neuromarketing
TRANSCRIPT
Neuromarketing
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers sensorimotor cognitive and affective response to marketing stimuli Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response andor sensors to measure changes in ones physiological state (heart rate respiratory rate galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do and what part of the brain is telling them to do it
Marketing analysts will use neuromarketing to better measure a consumers preference as the verbal response given to the question Do you like this product may not always be the true answer due to cognitive bias This knowledge will help marketers create products and services designed more effectively and marketing campaigns focused more on the brains response This makes neuromarketing and its applied results potentially subliminal
Neuromarketing will tell the marketer what the consumer reacts to whether it was the color of the packaging the sound the box makes when shaken or the idea that they will have something their co-consumers do not
The word neuromarketing was coined by Ale Smidts in 2002[1]
Dr David Lewis founder of The Mindlab International has been dubbed the father of Neuromarketing for his pioneering studies of analysing brain activity for research and commercial purposes
One of the main psychological principles behind marketing is the concept of priming Priming a subject with a certain topic such as dog sets off an electrochemical reaction in the neural frameworks that code for dogs Subsequent exposure to dog-related stimuli is processed faster because of the electrochemical priming Assimiliation is the process by which new information is assimilated or incorporated into ones existing neural structures Advertising agencies know how important it is to repeat their messages so that priming and assimilation can take place Priming usually occurs without the conscious awareness of the individual even though the subsequent behavior of the individual may be altered by the priming
Coke vs Pepsi
In a study from the group of Read Montague the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine published in 2004 in Neuron[2] 67 people had their brains scanned while being given the Pepsi Challenge a blind taste test of Coca-Cola and Pepsi Half the subjects chose Pepsi since Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in their brains ventromedial prefrontal cortex a region thought to process feelings of reward But when the subjects were told they were drinking Coke three-quarters said that Coke tasted better Their brain
activity had also changed The lateral prefrontal cortex an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers and the hippocampus an area related to memory were now being used indicating that the consumers were thinking about Coke and relating it to memories and other impressions The results demonstrated that Pepsi should have half the market share but in reality consumers are buying Coke for reasons related less to their taste preferences and more to their experience with the Coke brand
Movie Trailers amp Political Speeches
MindSign Neuromarketing a company based out of San Diego California is the first company to begin using fMRI technology to analyze a subjects brain while watching movie trailers They have also begun to scan the political speeches of President Barack Obama
References
^ David Lewis amp Darren Brigder (JulyAugust 2005) Market Researchers make Increasing use of Brain Imaging Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 5 (3) 35+ httpwwwdrdavidlewiscoukassetsNeuroMarket1pdf
^ Samuel M McClure Jian Li Damon Tomlin Kim S Cypert Lataneacute M Montague and P Read Montague (2004) Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks (abstract) Neuron 44 (2) 379ndash387 doi101016jneuron200409019 PMID 15473974 httpwwwneuronorgcontentarticleabstractuid=PIIS0896627304006129
Mary Carmichael (November 2004) Neuromarketing Is It Coming to a Lab Near You PBS (Frontline The Persuaders) httpwwwpbsorgwgbhpagesfrontlineshowspersuadersetcneurohtml Retrieved 2007-06-12
Media Maze Neuromarketing Part I
httpwwwdrdavidlewiscouk
httpwwwthemindlabcouk
httpeditioncnncom2010TECHinnovation1005neuromarketingindexhtml
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to Neuromarketing
[
Affective neuroscience middot Behavioral neurology middot Behavioral neuroscience middot Brainndashcomputer interface middot Chronobiology middot Cognitive neuroscience middot Computational neuroscience middot Connectomics middot Imaging
genetics middot Molecular cellular cognition middot Neural engineering middot Neural network (both artificial and biological) middot Neural signal processing middot Neural tissue regeneration middot Neuroanatomy middot Neuroanthropology middot Neurobioengineering middot Neurobiotics middot Neurocardiology middot Neurochemistry middot Neurochip middot Neurodegeneration middot Neuroeconomics middot Neuroeducation middot Neuroendocrinology middot Neuroepidemiology middot Neuroergonomics middot Neuroethics middot Neuroethology middot Neurogastroenterology middot Neurogenetics middot Neuroimaging middot Neuroimmunology middot Neuroinformatics middot Neurointensive care middot Neurolaw middot Neurolinguistics middot Neurology middot Neuromarketing middot Neurometrics middot Neuromodulation middot Neuromonitoring middot Neuro-ophthalmology middot Neuropathology middot Neuropharmacology middot Neurophilosophy middot Neuroaesthetics middot Neurophysics middot Neurophysiology middot Neuroplasticity middot Neuroprosthetics middot Neuropsychiatry middot Neuro-psychoanalysis middot Neuropsychology middot Neuroradiology middot Neurorehabilitation middot Neurorobotics middot Neurosociology middot Neurosurgery middot Neurotechnology middot Neurotheology middot Neurotransmitter middot Neurovirology middot Psychiatric genetics middot Psychiatry middot Psychology middot Sleep middot Systems neuroscience
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License additional terms may apply See Terms of Use for details
What does it take to make you happy Not much A classic study by psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that ten cents would do the trick He and his cohorts
repeatedly placed a dime near a copy machine where they knew it would be found When the subjects who found the dime were surveyed shortly after their discovery their overall satisfaction
with life was substantially higher than other subjects who did not find a coin
While the original study was conducted back in 1987 when a dime bought more than it does today
the basic idea remains the same even a tiny positive surprise can improve onersquos outlook albeit
temporarily In an interview with the Baltimore Sun Schwarz noted ldquoItrsquos not the value of what you
find Itrsquos that something positive happened to yourdquo
Food Works Too
The same article in the Baltimore Sun described a similar effect using a food sample ldquoAnother study
asked people leaving a grocery store to evaluate only their satisfaction with their TVs back homehellip
Those who minutes earlier got a free sample of food from the store liked their TVs better than those
who missed the samplerdquo
Branding Implications
While these results may be fascinating for academics who study the psychology of happiness what
are the takeways for marketers The biggest I think is that one has the opportunity to create an
association of improved mood with a brand if a small positive surprise can be delivered at the
same time And it doesnrsquot have to be a total surprise ndash receiving a food sample at a grocery store
isnrsquot a shocking occurrence
Irsquom sure Neuromarketing readers can come up with a host of ways to create a small positive
surprise but here are a few that came to my mind immediately
Sampling but with clear brand identity Sampling is fairly pervasive these days in supermarkets and wholesale stores but often the brand identity is lost in the shuffle Sampling in a venue not already flooded with sampling stations ensuring that the display shows the brand and training the attendant to mention the brand by name would do the trick
Surprise in the box Product makers could include a small inexpensive free accessory or promotional item in the product package Obviously putting ldquofree ___ insiderdquo on the outside of the box would kill any surprise But calling the item a ldquofree giftrdquo inside the box would emphasize that it is of some value or utility and likely enhance the surprise
Have YOU found a way to surprise your customers
Creepy Footnote I was researching this article at Starbucks and was amused to see the Sun
article include the comment ldquoAmazing how a mouthful of free lemon pound cake can improve your
lifehelliprdquo Literally minutes before reading that eleven-year old article the Starbucks barista had
surprised ME by giving me a slice of you guessed it LEMON POUND CAKE (Apparently the cake
was actually a gift of an earlier patron who wanted to treat fellow coffee lovers rather than a targeted
mood-enhancement by Starbucks neuromarketing wizards)
The Advertised Mind
Reviews at AmazoncomCognitive science meets Madison Avenue May 24 2007
By Rolf Dobelli getabstractcom (Luzern Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from The Advertised Mind Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
activity had also changed The lateral prefrontal cortex an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers and the hippocampus an area related to memory were now being used indicating that the consumers were thinking about Coke and relating it to memories and other impressions The results demonstrated that Pepsi should have half the market share but in reality consumers are buying Coke for reasons related less to their taste preferences and more to their experience with the Coke brand
Movie Trailers amp Political Speeches
MindSign Neuromarketing a company based out of San Diego California is the first company to begin using fMRI technology to analyze a subjects brain while watching movie trailers They have also begun to scan the political speeches of President Barack Obama
References
^ David Lewis amp Darren Brigder (JulyAugust 2005) Market Researchers make Increasing use of Brain Imaging Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 5 (3) 35+ httpwwwdrdavidlewiscoukassetsNeuroMarket1pdf
^ Samuel M McClure Jian Li Damon Tomlin Kim S Cypert Lataneacute M Montague and P Read Montague (2004) Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks (abstract) Neuron 44 (2) 379ndash387 doi101016jneuron200409019 PMID 15473974 httpwwwneuronorgcontentarticleabstractuid=PIIS0896627304006129
Mary Carmichael (November 2004) Neuromarketing Is It Coming to a Lab Near You PBS (Frontline The Persuaders) httpwwwpbsorgwgbhpagesfrontlineshowspersuadersetcneurohtml Retrieved 2007-06-12
Media Maze Neuromarketing Part I
httpwwwdrdavidlewiscouk
httpwwwthemindlabcouk
httpeditioncnncom2010TECHinnovation1005neuromarketingindexhtml
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to Neuromarketing
[
Affective neuroscience middot Behavioral neurology middot Behavioral neuroscience middot Brainndashcomputer interface middot Chronobiology middot Cognitive neuroscience middot Computational neuroscience middot Connectomics middot Imaging
genetics middot Molecular cellular cognition middot Neural engineering middot Neural network (both artificial and biological) middot Neural signal processing middot Neural tissue regeneration middot Neuroanatomy middot Neuroanthropology middot Neurobioengineering middot Neurobiotics middot Neurocardiology middot Neurochemistry middot Neurochip middot Neurodegeneration middot Neuroeconomics middot Neuroeducation middot Neuroendocrinology middot Neuroepidemiology middot Neuroergonomics middot Neuroethics middot Neuroethology middot Neurogastroenterology middot Neurogenetics middot Neuroimaging middot Neuroimmunology middot Neuroinformatics middot Neurointensive care middot Neurolaw middot Neurolinguistics middot Neurology middot Neuromarketing middot Neurometrics middot Neuromodulation middot Neuromonitoring middot Neuro-ophthalmology middot Neuropathology middot Neuropharmacology middot Neurophilosophy middot Neuroaesthetics middot Neurophysics middot Neurophysiology middot Neuroplasticity middot Neuroprosthetics middot Neuropsychiatry middot Neuro-psychoanalysis middot Neuropsychology middot Neuroradiology middot Neurorehabilitation middot Neurorobotics middot Neurosociology middot Neurosurgery middot Neurotechnology middot Neurotheology middot Neurotransmitter middot Neurovirology middot Psychiatric genetics middot Psychiatry middot Psychology middot Sleep middot Systems neuroscience
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License additional terms may apply See Terms of Use for details
What does it take to make you happy Not much A classic study by psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that ten cents would do the trick He and his cohorts
repeatedly placed a dime near a copy machine where they knew it would be found When the subjects who found the dime were surveyed shortly after their discovery their overall satisfaction
with life was substantially higher than other subjects who did not find a coin
While the original study was conducted back in 1987 when a dime bought more than it does today
the basic idea remains the same even a tiny positive surprise can improve onersquos outlook albeit
temporarily In an interview with the Baltimore Sun Schwarz noted ldquoItrsquos not the value of what you
find Itrsquos that something positive happened to yourdquo
Food Works Too
The same article in the Baltimore Sun described a similar effect using a food sample ldquoAnother study
asked people leaving a grocery store to evaluate only their satisfaction with their TVs back homehellip
Those who minutes earlier got a free sample of food from the store liked their TVs better than those
who missed the samplerdquo
Branding Implications
While these results may be fascinating for academics who study the psychology of happiness what
are the takeways for marketers The biggest I think is that one has the opportunity to create an
association of improved mood with a brand if a small positive surprise can be delivered at the
same time And it doesnrsquot have to be a total surprise ndash receiving a food sample at a grocery store
isnrsquot a shocking occurrence
Irsquom sure Neuromarketing readers can come up with a host of ways to create a small positive
surprise but here are a few that came to my mind immediately
Sampling but with clear brand identity Sampling is fairly pervasive these days in supermarkets and wholesale stores but often the brand identity is lost in the shuffle Sampling in a venue not already flooded with sampling stations ensuring that the display shows the brand and training the attendant to mention the brand by name would do the trick
Surprise in the box Product makers could include a small inexpensive free accessory or promotional item in the product package Obviously putting ldquofree ___ insiderdquo on the outside of the box would kill any surprise But calling the item a ldquofree giftrdquo inside the box would emphasize that it is of some value or utility and likely enhance the surprise
Have YOU found a way to surprise your customers
Creepy Footnote I was researching this article at Starbucks and was amused to see the Sun
article include the comment ldquoAmazing how a mouthful of free lemon pound cake can improve your
lifehelliprdquo Literally minutes before reading that eleven-year old article the Starbucks barista had
surprised ME by giving me a slice of you guessed it LEMON POUND CAKE (Apparently the cake
was actually a gift of an earlier patron who wanted to treat fellow coffee lovers rather than a targeted
mood-enhancement by Starbucks neuromarketing wizards)
The Advertised Mind
Reviews at AmazoncomCognitive science meets Madison Avenue May 24 2007
By Rolf Dobelli getabstractcom (Luzern Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from The Advertised Mind Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
genetics middot Molecular cellular cognition middot Neural engineering middot Neural network (both artificial and biological) middot Neural signal processing middot Neural tissue regeneration middot Neuroanatomy middot Neuroanthropology middot Neurobioengineering middot Neurobiotics middot Neurocardiology middot Neurochemistry middot Neurochip middot Neurodegeneration middot Neuroeconomics middot Neuroeducation middot Neuroendocrinology middot Neuroepidemiology middot Neuroergonomics middot Neuroethics middot Neuroethology middot Neurogastroenterology middot Neurogenetics middot Neuroimaging middot Neuroimmunology middot Neuroinformatics middot Neurointensive care middot Neurolaw middot Neurolinguistics middot Neurology middot Neuromarketing middot Neurometrics middot Neuromodulation middot Neuromonitoring middot Neuro-ophthalmology middot Neuropathology middot Neuropharmacology middot Neurophilosophy middot Neuroaesthetics middot Neurophysics middot Neurophysiology middot Neuroplasticity middot Neuroprosthetics middot Neuropsychiatry middot Neuro-psychoanalysis middot Neuropsychology middot Neuroradiology middot Neurorehabilitation middot Neurorobotics middot Neurosociology middot Neurosurgery middot Neurotechnology middot Neurotheology middot Neurotransmitter middot Neurovirology middot Psychiatric genetics middot Psychiatry middot Psychology middot Sleep middot Systems neuroscience
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License additional terms may apply See Terms of Use for details
What does it take to make you happy Not much A classic study by psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that ten cents would do the trick He and his cohorts
repeatedly placed a dime near a copy machine where they knew it would be found When the subjects who found the dime were surveyed shortly after their discovery their overall satisfaction
with life was substantially higher than other subjects who did not find a coin
While the original study was conducted back in 1987 when a dime bought more than it does today
the basic idea remains the same even a tiny positive surprise can improve onersquos outlook albeit
temporarily In an interview with the Baltimore Sun Schwarz noted ldquoItrsquos not the value of what you
find Itrsquos that something positive happened to yourdquo
Food Works Too
The same article in the Baltimore Sun described a similar effect using a food sample ldquoAnother study
asked people leaving a grocery store to evaluate only their satisfaction with their TVs back homehellip
Those who minutes earlier got a free sample of food from the store liked their TVs better than those
who missed the samplerdquo
Branding Implications
While these results may be fascinating for academics who study the psychology of happiness what
are the takeways for marketers The biggest I think is that one has the opportunity to create an
association of improved mood with a brand if a small positive surprise can be delivered at the
same time And it doesnrsquot have to be a total surprise ndash receiving a food sample at a grocery store
isnrsquot a shocking occurrence
Irsquom sure Neuromarketing readers can come up with a host of ways to create a small positive
surprise but here are a few that came to my mind immediately
Sampling but with clear brand identity Sampling is fairly pervasive these days in supermarkets and wholesale stores but often the brand identity is lost in the shuffle Sampling in a venue not already flooded with sampling stations ensuring that the display shows the brand and training the attendant to mention the brand by name would do the trick
Surprise in the box Product makers could include a small inexpensive free accessory or promotional item in the product package Obviously putting ldquofree ___ insiderdquo on the outside of the box would kill any surprise But calling the item a ldquofree giftrdquo inside the box would emphasize that it is of some value or utility and likely enhance the surprise
Have YOU found a way to surprise your customers
Creepy Footnote I was researching this article at Starbucks and was amused to see the Sun
article include the comment ldquoAmazing how a mouthful of free lemon pound cake can improve your
lifehelliprdquo Literally minutes before reading that eleven-year old article the Starbucks barista had
surprised ME by giving me a slice of you guessed it LEMON POUND CAKE (Apparently the cake
was actually a gift of an earlier patron who wanted to treat fellow coffee lovers rather than a targeted
mood-enhancement by Starbucks neuromarketing wizards)
The Advertised Mind
Reviews at AmazoncomCognitive science meets Madison Avenue May 24 2007
By Rolf Dobelli getabstractcom (Luzern Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from The Advertised Mind Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
The same article in the Baltimore Sun described a similar effect using a food sample ldquoAnother study
asked people leaving a grocery store to evaluate only their satisfaction with their TVs back homehellip
Those who minutes earlier got a free sample of food from the store liked their TVs better than those
who missed the samplerdquo
Branding Implications
While these results may be fascinating for academics who study the psychology of happiness what
are the takeways for marketers The biggest I think is that one has the opportunity to create an
association of improved mood with a brand if a small positive surprise can be delivered at the
same time And it doesnrsquot have to be a total surprise ndash receiving a food sample at a grocery store
isnrsquot a shocking occurrence
Irsquom sure Neuromarketing readers can come up with a host of ways to create a small positive
surprise but here are a few that came to my mind immediately
Sampling but with clear brand identity Sampling is fairly pervasive these days in supermarkets and wholesale stores but often the brand identity is lost in the shuffle Sampling in a venue not already flooded with sampling stations ensuring that the display shows the brand and training the attendant to mention the brand by name would do the trick
Surprise in the box Product makers could include a small inexpensive free accessory or promotional item in the product package Obviously putting ldquofree ___ insiderdquo on the outside of the box would kill any surprise But calling the item a ldquofree giftrdquo inside the box would emphasize that it is of some value or utility and likely enhance the surprise
Have YOU found a way to surprise your customers
Creepy Footnote I was researching this article at Starbucks and was amused to see the Sun
article include the comment ldquoAmazing how a mouthful of free lemon pound cake can improve your
lifehelliprdquo Literally minutes before reading that eleven-year old article the Starbucks barista had
surprised ME by giving me a slice of you guessed it LEMON POUND CAKE (Apparently the cake
was actually a gift of an earlier patron who wanted to treat fellow coffee lovers rather than a targeted
mood-enhancement by Starbucks neuromarketing wizards)
The Advertised Mind
Reviews at AmazoncomCognitive science meets Madison Avenue May 24 2007
By Rolf Dobelli getabstractcom (Luzern Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from The Advertised Mind Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
The Advertised Mind
Reviews at AmazoncomCognitive science meets Madison Avenue May 24 2007
By Rolf Dobelli getabstractcom (Luzern Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from The Advertised Mind Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
Cognitive ControlThis is really where the heart of the pseudo-neuro-marketing discussions are coming unstuck to what extent do we retain rational control over our behaviour after all the evidence about emotions
Click on my tab for Prof Damasio - who is credited for the emotions drive decisions view and what he says about this
What is amazing is how multidisciplinary this issue is and the very big role that Artificial Neural Networks play in the answer as it is being revealed
Below is an important site that you can really frequent
httpscienceblogscomdevelopingintelligence200904directed_inhibition_in_cortexphp
Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
[ Cognitive Neuroscience Computational Modeling ]Posted on April 21 2009 1127 AM by Chris Chatham
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via biased competition - that is representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way By theory this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate functioning as a conflict monitor and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive and not quite biased enough However new anatomical data reported in a recent issue of Neuron reveals some complexities to this simple theoretical story
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Medalla amp Barbas report that in addition to excitatory projections from the anterior cingulate to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which perhaps accomplish the upregulation of biased competition in the presence of conflict as outlined above) the anterior cingulate is distinct from other areas projecting to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the higher number of synapses onto inhibitory neurons In other words the anterior cingulate can not only upregulate but also downregulate prefrontal activity Instead a different area of the prefrontal cortex (area 46) might be in a better position to upregulate activity based on its anatomical connectivity to calretinin neurons - ultimately yielding a disinhibitory effect in the PFC
This evidence touches on a larger debate in the cognitive neuroscience community surrounding the neural basis of cognitive control Intuitively speaking it seems reasonable that the brain might implement control over thought and behavior by suppressing unwanted representations While neural network models indicate that the same function can be achieved by way of biased competition the evidence reported by Medalla amp Barbas suggests that biased competition may only be part of the story Given this preferentially-inhibitory connectivity from the anterior cingulate to an area of the prefrontal cortex one might expect that both biased competition and long-range inhibition play a role in cognitive control
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS THE BRAIN AND THE BRAND
Why talk about history in a story about the futureI tell my students when they ask this question that unless one understand the history one cannot evaluate the import of things that are happening in the present nor how the present will affect the past This is one of those philosophical statements that older people often make just so that what they remember seems important The real reason for understanding the past I also tell my students is that when they start to work they will find many people saying things that sound convincing but are old paradigms There are many urban legends about the brain and about advertising in particular these abounds and are very often repeated in board rooms where they become the basis of decision-making It is much better to warn my students so they have an open mind In this history overview I will limit myself largely to things that involve the brain-brand interaction and especially emotions This will only involve some lsquomarketingrsquo names Marketing (and Consumer Behavior) is itself an endeavor that relies on views expressed by psychologists philosophers economists statisticians sociologists quacks and now neurologists I also explained in the introductory sections that there are many disciplines involved in the study of the brain and I have to include many of these disciplines in my historical overview
A Century of Self
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
BBC2 produce a documentary titled lsquoA Century of the Selfrsquo available from amazoncom and really worth getting It is the story of advertising from 1900 through to why Tony Blair was moved out and the end of George Bushrsquos term in office The underlying theme is that advertising evolved as society evolved as psychology evolved as the political climate evolved and as the economic situations changed etc
384-322BC AristotleAristotle draws a clear distinction between emotions and the rational in legal arguments and the morality of using emotions to achieve objectives that should only be achieved by rational arguments This remains a principle in most legal systems
1600rsquos Descartes From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Reneacute Descartes (March 31 1596 ndash February 11 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher mathematician scientist and writer He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction to his writings which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day His influence in mathematics is also apparent the Cartesian coordinate system that is used in plane geometry and algebra being named for him and he was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic as if no one had written on these matters before
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism the revived Stoicism of the 16th century or in earlier philosophers like St Augustine In his natural philosophy he differs from the Schools on two major points first he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form second he rejects any appeal to endsmdashdivine or naturalmdashin explaining natural phenomena In his theology he insists on the absolute freedom of Godrsquos act of creation
Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes Locke Berkeley and Hume
Leibniz Spinoza and Descartes were all versed in mathematics as well as philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system Descartes founded analytic geometry the bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of calculus and analysis
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Descartess reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence blossomed into the Turing test and related thought
His most famous statement is Cogito ergo sum (French Je pense donc je suis English I think therefore I am) found in sect7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French)
In talks at conferences I often amuse people by telling them how Descartes viewed the brain He postulated that in the brain there is a small human being which he called a Homunculus (latin for lsquolittle manrsquo) This little man sees through the eyes listen trough the ears etc This became known as the Cartesian Theatre This little man had a lot of levers (like a crane operator) through which he manipulated the arms legs etc The instructions to the muscles were promulgated via the nerves in liquid form Vitae (the juices of live) are pumped through the nerves to pump up the muscles and cause motion He also concluded that we never find the homunculus in dead peoplersquos brains because he disintegrates into a grey pulpy substance when he is dead This description amuses audiences Until I remind them that at that time no-one knew about electricity Which means that nerves had no real function and his description of how vitae pumps up muscles was a few hundred years before its time Probably everybody with an education has heard Cogito ergo sum The English I think therefore I am should be read by students of this book to read I am rational therefore I am And one can even read this as lsquoI am logicalrsquo or lsquoI am rationalrsquo or even lsquoI think about products in terms of their functionalityrsquo After Descartes the role of emotion was delegated to lsquosomething that interferes with rationalityrsquo A useful mnemonic would be
RATIONALIRRATIONALEMOTIONAL
1776 Adam Smith
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
It is not often that Adam smith is mentioned in marketing texts but he is a very important influence as far as understanding feelings versus rationality He is considered to be the father of economic theory And letrsquos be honest Economic Theory is the basis of all marketing theory in terms of pricing and benefits derived from the brand Classical Economic theory states If a product shortage occurs its price rises creating a profit margin that creates an incentive for others to enter production eventually curing the shortage If too many producers enter the market the increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would lower the price of the product to its production cost the natural price This is based on the Homo economicus (he did not use this term but it is generally understood to be what he was talking about)From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoHomo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals This approach has been formalized in certain social science models particularly in economics
Homo economicus is seen as rational in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunitiesrdquo (from wikipedia)
The way this Homo economicus makes decisions (productbrand choices) is based on the utility he derives from the various products compared to their prices
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoIn economics utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services Given this measure one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase ones utility For illustrative purposes changes in utility are sometimes expressed in units called utils
The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society According to utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1876) society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals aiming for the greatest happiness for the greatest number
In neoclassical economics rationality is precisely defined in terms of imputed utility-maximizing behavior under economic constraints As a hypothetical behavioral measure utility does not require attribution of mental states suggested by happiness satisfaction etcrdquo (from wikipedia)
There are two aspects of Adam Smith that is important to my story He assumes a Homo Economicus ie that people are rational This is generally assumed
to mean that you are not making decisions based on emotional motivations (or irrational motivations)
He also assumes that everybody is fully informed Not only the supplier (in our case the marketer) but also the consumer
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
No wonder economics is sometimes called the dismal science if it excludes mental states of happiness and satisfaction
1872 Charles DarwinBest known for his views on evolution which he published in 1859 in ldquoThe origin of the Speciesrdquo Darwin is also a pioneer in studying emotion in animals This he published in 1872 ldquoThe Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsrdquo I will not delve on his contributions but I do feel one should refer to him just so that the reader can see at what time in history Darwin became an influence ndash and also the fact that he studied emotions
1884 William James There are two issues about James that impact on my story The obvious one is his speculation about emotions (and his famous question about why we run from a bear) The second and less obvious contribution by James is his views on beliefs The reader will recognize some of his thinking when I describe what Neuro-economists are doing today From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
WritingsWilliam James wrote voluminously throughout his life A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete Psychology The Briefer Course was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective
Cash ValueJames went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth He would seek the meaning of true by examining how the idea functioned in our lives A belief was true he said if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life what their Cash Value was what consequences they led to
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness If what was true was what worked we can scientifically investigate religions claim to truth in the same manner The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying mdash they enabled us to lead fuller richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence just as scientific beliefs were
William James bearFrom Joseph LeDouxs description of William James Emotion
Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger Because we are afraid of what will happen if we dont This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled What Is an Emotion The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind as there were no psychology journals yet It was important not because it definitively answered the question it raised but because of the way in which James phrased his response He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system and ends with a passionate feeling a conscious emotional experience A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequencemdashto figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling James set out to answer his question by asking another do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run He proposed that the obvious answer that we run because we are afraid was wrong and instead argued that we are afraid because we run Our natural way of thinking about emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called feeling by Damasio) The essence of James proposal was simple It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart tight stomach sweaty palms tense muscles and
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
so on sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world According to James emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations For example when we see James bear we run away During this act of escape the body goes through a physiological upheaval blood pressure rises heart rate increases pupils dilate palms sweat muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary innate defense mechanisms) Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals In each case the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love The mental aspect of emotion the feeling is a slave to its physiology not vice versa we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry The reader will now also understand why I chose to start my story with a description of the neurology of feelings etc and then introduce the history of feelings Without an understanding of the biology just reading the last paragraph above would have sounded like mere speculation by William James ndash which it was With the modern biological insight of how an emotion is created it is amazing how close to the truth Jamesrsquo speculation was On my website wwwerikdupcom I have a copy of Prof Damasiorsquos Barcelona talk in which he also pays tribute to William James
1900-1940 Sigmund FreudNot much happened that is interesting until Sigmund Freud happened From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoAfter opening his own medical practice specializing in neurology Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems
This came to be known as the talking cure as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected and imprisoned in the unconscious mind
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Freud called this denial of emotions repression and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche and could also retard physical functioning as well which he described as psychosomatic symptoms
(The term talking cure was initially coined by the patient Anna O who was treated by Freuds colleague Josef Breuer) The talking cure is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysisrdquo
I must admit up-front that I am not a great fan of Freud and his theories I am especially negative because a lot of his theories are applied willy-nilly to advertising and market research without any real consideration of the implications
It is especially market researchers that argue for the implications of the sub-conscious as far as brand choice and advertising effect is concerned that upsets me In fact I think that Freud had many very valid viewpoints but that pop-psycho-researchers present these in ways that will make Freud turn in his grave
To not present a personal (negative) view I have chosen to take large quotes out of Wikipedia to introduce lsquoFreud by the expertsrsquo
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoThe goal of Freudian therapy or psychoanalysis was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings
Classically the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst Through this process transference the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents
ldquoPerhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior
However as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out contrary to what most people believe the unconscious was not discovered by Freud In 1890 when psychoanalysis was still unheard of William James in his monumental treatise on psychology examined the way Schopenhauer von Hartmann Janet Binet and others had used the term unconscious and subconscious
ldquoFreud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious This meant that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it
The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought its contents could be accessed with a little effort
ldquoOne key factor in the operation of the unconscious is repression Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind he also observed that repression varies among individual patients
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a persons consciousness Thus people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences
Later Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious the descriptive unconscious the dynamic unconscious and the system unconscious
The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware
The dynamic unconscious a more specific construct referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes
The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind such as condensation and displacement
Eventually Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious replacing it with the concept of the Ego super-ego and id Throughout his career however he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (source wikipedia)
The Century of Selfrsquo really brings home that to understand Freud one must understand the times he lived in and also his view of people The movie explains the massive influence Freud had on advertising thinking and still has Freud was a subscriber to the paradigm of Descartes believing that ideally we should live as rational beings and emotions (like irrational fears) impact on our ability to behave rationally Therefore we need treatment for our emotions Freudrsquos disciples popularized the idea of therapy sessions It is especially group therapy sessions that became popular in the 1960rsquos and was the forerunner of what we now call focus groups (I have done a lot of focus groups in my research career and found them extremely useful as a research tool but when done without the psycho-babble)
1943 - Needs and Maslow From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans innate curiosity
Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein Jane Addams Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people writing that the study of crippled stunted immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy Maslow also studied the healthiest one percent of the college student population
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Maslows hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with physiological needs while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs Deficiency needs must be met first Once these are met seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth
The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized If a lower set of needs is no longer being met the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs but will not permanently regress to the lower level For instance a businessman (at the esteem level) who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs) but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission
The reader should go to wikipedia where the higher order needs are discussed in this section we concentrate on the very basic physiological needs From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Deficiency needsThe first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called deficiency needs or D-needs the individual does not feel anything if they are met but feel anxious if they are not met The deficiency needs are Physiological Safety needs LoveBelonging and Esteem needs
Physiological needsThese are the basic animal needs for such things as food warmth shelter sex water and other body needs If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced all of his energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive Maslow explains that Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of mans goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly blind to many things It is quite true that man lives by bread alone mdash when there is no bread
The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence These consist mainly of
Excretion
Eating
Sex
Drinking
Sleeping
Shelter
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Warmth
If some needs are not fulfilled a humans physiological needs take the highest priority Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness pain and discomfort
Safety needsWith his physical needs relatively satisfied the individuals safety needs take over and dominate his behavior These needs have to do with mans yearning for a predictable orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare In the world of work these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority savings accounts insurance policies and the like
For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in our affluent and relatively lawful society The obvious exceptions of course are people outside the mainstream mdash the poor the disadvantaged and members of minority groups If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs They are primarily concerned with survival obtaining adequate food clothing shelter and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups
Safety needs include
Personal security from crime
Security against company lay-offs
Health and well-being
Safety net against accidentsillness and the adverse impacts
Ultimately 90 of the brands that readers will come across operate on the lower two levels of this pyramid Many of these might be positioned by the marketer as ALSO operating on the third level In other words a brand of soap operates on the SAFETY level but might be positioned as also operating on the LOVEBELONGING level The fact that a brand might be positioned to operate on the higher levels does not reduce the fact that it is operating on the lower levels
1946 Hebbs monkeysIt is very difficult unless you were a psychologist back before the 1960rsquos to really understand how much science denied the role of emotions Demonstrating a different point Oatley and Jenkins in Understanding Emotions describe Hebbs work with chimpanzees but this story really demonstrates a point that fits very well into my story about emotions and especially the understanding of emotions
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
I have quoted this experiment before ndash maybe I should move it here
1950 ndash Ernest Dichter Motivational Research Motivational research comprises of a number of techniques the most common being focus groups and depth interviews It was popularized by Dichter first in the UK and then in the USA Motivational research is broadly based on Freuds theories and methods Dichter became a `brand in 1950s America where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden motivations of their consumers When Dichter arrived in London British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique These techniques are still very popular research approaches used today The claim is still made that they get to the real (or hidden) reasons people buy brands Generally this is now called qualitative research rather than motivational research and is the opposite of quantitative techniques Unfortunately a degree of distrust (even dislike) has developed between qualies and quanties over the years My view is that a researcher should not claim to be a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher ndash these are both tools of the same trade It is like a gardener claiming to be a shears man and not a spade man I have found it very useful to combine qualitative and quantitative studies Either doing the qualitative component before or after the quantitative component Unfortunately this happens less often than what it should because qualitative and quantitative researchers seldom reside inside the same company and therefore seldom become friends It is often argued that they do not work in the same company due to them being different types of people Having run a big research company I believe the difference is more to do with the type of work they do qualitative people work in the evenings and come to the office late in the morning which leads to envy from the office people that have regular hours Since a lot of what is done by qualitative people derive from Dichter and hence Freud they are firmly of the view that decisions are more driven by emotional than rational reasons (and they
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
often make the implicit assumption that quantitative researchers believe that decisions are only driven by rational reasons) Since the Damassio paradigm is that emotions creates rationality and that decisions are therefore a blend of these it is my hope that the two research techniques will drift closer This will greatly benefit brands and researchers
1960rsquoS Borden and McCarthy The birth of the lsquomarketing mixrsquo and the 4 Prsquos of marketing This is probably the date that should be considered to be the lsquobirth of marketingrsquo at least as a formalized discipline From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
In the early 1960s Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a ldquoMarketing Mixrdquo Professor E Jerome McCarthy also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements product price place and promotion
1965 ndash Fishbein The Fishbein model is also known as the multi-attribute model and some people refer to it as the multi-association model Simplistically it assumes that if you can have people rate a brand (or associate it with) attributes and if you know what the value of each attribute is then you can determine an overall score which is there attitude to the brand (likelihood to buy)
Ao=[SUM]BiEi
where
Ao = the overall attitude toward object o
Bi = the strength of the belief that object o has some particular attribute i
Ei = the evaluation of the goodness or badness of attribute i
It is obvious how this model derives from Adam Smithrsquos theories of utility In fact the term Ao is often referred to as the brands utility Over the years a lot of work has been done on this model using different mathematical funtions (rather than mere summing) trying out options of only using the top n important attributes to predict etc Most of these have had some predictability
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
The two main problems are
1 The attributes in a study is often correlated especially the important ones and this leads to double counting in the above formula This can be removed by factor analysis but
2 The model should be done at a respondent level (micro-modeling) and it is impossible to remove correlation at a respondent level
This still remains the foundation for many brand equity evaluation models Specifically those that conclude If you increase your brands perception on attribute (i) then the value will increase by $xObviously the Fishbein model is the extreme of rational views of how consumers make decisions
1960s - SperryAmazingly to this day there exists the common belief that the brain hemispheres specialize in emotioncreativity on the right side and rationalitylogic on the left side Pop-psychologists and others present these concepts to this day in training programs for companies and consultants exploit this misconception All of this is based on the paradigm of emotion-versus-rationality and especially on a misperception of the work done Walcott Sperry (a neurologist) with split brain patients Again because the pop-culture around this issue is so widely believed I will refer to Wikipedia From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
ldquoRoger Wolcott Sperry (August 20 1913 ndash April 17 1994) was a neuropsychologist neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research
ldquoBefore Sperrys experiments some research evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable In his early experiments Sperry showed that the opposite was true after early development circuits of the brain are largely hardwired
In his Nobel-winning work Sperry tested ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen a neurosurgeon in Rochester NY
The surgery designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures involves severing the corpus callosum the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness
In his words each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right perceiving thinking remembering reasoning willing and emoting all at a characteristically human level and both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different even in mutually conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel mdashRoger Wolcott Sperry 1974
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function In 1989 Sperry also received the National Medal of Science
These findings somehow became popularized into people being left brain or right brain and therefore being either emotionalcreative or logicalrational I will continue this story into Krugmans thoughts later
Lets look at the modern view
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain
These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides
In many instances the focus of the laterization entails functions attributable to very specific brain regions and in other instances distributed activations associated with more than one brain region
However there is some division of mental processing
Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions mdash even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
The best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability is language Both of the major areas involved in language skills Brocas area and Wernickes area are in the left hemisphere Perceptual information from the eyes ears and rest of the body is sent to the opposite hemisphere and motor information sent out to the body also comes from the opposite hemisphere (see also primary sensory areas)
Neuropsychologists (eg Roger Sperry Michael Gazzaniga) have studied split-brain patients to better understand lateralization Sperry pioneered the use of lateralized tachistoscopes to present visual information to one hemisphere or the other Scientists have also studied people born without a corpus callosum to determine specialization of brain hemispheres
The magnocellular pathway of the visual system sends more information to the right hemisphere while the parvocellular pathway sends more information to the left hemisphere
There are higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine on the right and higher levels of dopamine on the left There is more white-matter (longer axons) on right and more grey-matter (cell bodies) on the left
Linear reasoning functions of language such as grammar and word production are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
In contrast holistic reasoning functions of language such as intonation and emphasis are often lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain
Other integrative functions such as intuitive or heuristic arithmetic binaural sound localization emotions etc seem to be more bilaterally controlled
In summary and see the first sentence of the above quote one should be very careful of any views that indicate rational versus anything being part of the brain lateralization
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
As far as this book is concerned the very last sentence is the most important emotions and heuristic decisions are not the functions of a specific side of the brain
Any marketing theories that imply a great distinction between emotions and rationality are firmly in the arena of Descartes Even if one want to assume that the different hemispheres have a different importance for emotions and rationality then one must remember the biggest nerve bundle in the brain is the corpus collosum which connect the two hemispheres and therefore it is very seldom that something happens in only one side
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
I THINK I REPEAT EVERYTHING HERE - MERGE
Left-brain-Right-brain theories [1]Xxx said ldquo ldquo (from Adv mind) Wikipedia has a more moderate view but nonetheless warns against the way these theories have been popularised From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lateralization of brain functionThe human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure separating the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance and every structure in each hemisphere is generally mirrored on the other side Despite these strong similarities the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different
Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg logic creativity) being lateralised that is located in the right or left side of the brain These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides However there is some division of mental processing Probably most fundamental to brain lateralization is the fact that the lateral sulcus is generally longer in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere Researchers have been investigating to what extent areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions If a specific region of the brain is injured or destroyed their functions can sometimes be recovered by neighboring brain regions - even opposite hemispheres This depends more on the age and the damage occurred than anything else
It is important to note thatmdashwhile functions are indeed lateralizedmdashthese lateralizations are trends and do not apply to every person in every case Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) there are no left-brained only or right-brained only people
Lateralization of brain functions is evident in the phenomena of right- or left-handedness -earedness and -eyedness But the handedness of a person is by no means a clear indication of location of brain function While 95 of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere only 188 of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere Additionally 198 of left-handers even have bilateral language functions
Brain hemispheric theories were really started by Drrsquos Sperry and Gazzaniga From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Split-brain patientsResearch by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry in the 1960s on split-brain patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy) a severing of a large part of the corpus callosum The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate When these connections are cut the two halves of the brain have a reduced capacity to communicate with each other This led to many interesting behavioral phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary language processing but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities
Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research For example the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR brain training equipment or management training One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing and its implications are always tightly delineated whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated and applied to an extremely wide range of situations
All the readers of this book will have been exposed to people selling training techniques etc under the guise of it being based on claims that it is based on sound scientific research In fact it is my experience that few people know that it is based on small specific differences between the hemispheres of people that have suffered severe trauma to their brain (severing millions of nerves connecting the two hemispheres)
Hines is right when he says that the concept is lsquoso easy to sellrsquo because it is an easy-to-understand notion But it is only an easy to understand notion if one views emotion to be different (and confounding) to rational thinking The moment one changes this paradigm to one where emotional and rational needs to be integrated for decision making then it makes absolutely no sense for these to reside in different hemispheres
1970rsquos Herbert Kruggman
THIS IS WHERE HEATH WILL GO FOR THE BOOK GET FACTS AND QUOTES FROM ORIGINAL PAPERSHerbert Kruggman was the hellip at hellip and was probably the first neuro-marketing experimenter of note He used things like eye-tracking and EEG to research advertising
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
During that time he published two papers in the Journal of Advertising Research that both had great influence in subsequent thinking
o ldquoOnce is enoughrdquoo ldquohelliprdquo
In terms of the current story his second paper ldquo ldquo is much more relevant Again because of its enduring influence on thinking not only in the last part of the previous century but even today He argued under the influence of Sperry and the pop-psychological view of the day about brain hemispheres that
Print is a rationallogical medium therefore addresses the left brain which is the rationallogical hemisphere
o Since recall measures relies on people recalling an advertisement based on verbal measures it accesses the right brain and therefore print should be tested using recall measures
Television is a visualemotional medium therefore addresses the right brain which is the emotional hemisphere
o Since recognition is a visual test of advertising memory it is the correct test for television advertising rather than a recall measure
The picture below shows the logic that Krugman applies This logic based on the paradigm of emotion versus rational still underlies many peoplersquos arguments about how advertising should be researched and mostly are unashamedly related back to Krugmans theories In 2008 the Wharton ran a conference to discuss the lsquoEmpirical Generalizationsrsquo about advertising at which the major players in this area were invited to talk Robert Heathrsquos paper was titled lsquoKrugman Was Rightrsquo indicating that the debate is still very active in the modern marketing arena Readers can access this paper at hellip
DO WE LEAVE THIS HEATH REFERENCE IN I THINK HE HANGS HIMSELF
1970-1991 Isen and Bower
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
CONSIDER DELETING I MIGHT HAVE REFERED THIS EARLIER AS A OATLEY AND JENKINS QUOTE ndash IN WHICH CASE ONLY REFER TO HEREMAKES THE POINT ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF MOODS These two psychologist conducted a series of projects in which they inspected what happens to cognition when they induce a lsquomoodrsquo My story is a lot about the effects of mood on consumer behaviour and it is worth while to read Oatley and Jenkinsrsquo description of these lsquomood inducedrsquo experiments by Isen and Bower I have quoted their work already in section xx
1979 - FCB Brain GridDave Berger and Richard Vaughn popularized this model for FCB advertising agency in the 1979 and it is one of the first advertising models that explicitly recognize emotions versus rational in the sense that the former has a role to play in decision making To put this into perspective the Fishbein model is a emotions-versus-rational model in the sense that it views rational as the only part of decision making (much like the Economics model of a homo economicus) The FCB brain grid introduces the role of emotions but still in a lsquoversusrsquo rational role I took the following description from a website (httpdrypeninadvertisingfcb-grid-model-to-convey-communication-objectiveshtml) The communication response would be different for high versus low involvement products and those which required mainly thinking (left brain) and feeling (right brain) information processing To define involvement and think feel eight scales are used High Involvement 1 Very important decision 2 Lot to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires lot of thought Low involvement
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
1 Unimportant decision 2 Little to lose if you choose the wrong brand 3 Decision requires little thought Think or rational approach1 Decision is is not mainly logical or objective 2 Decision is is not based mainly on functional facts Feel or emotional approach1 Decision is is not based on a lot of feeling 2 Decision does does not express onersquos personality 3 Decision is is not based on looks tastes touch smell or sound (sensory effects) I do not know how much this model is still used in practice (especially since it is associated with one advertising agency) but it is probably the best known advertising model A contributing factor to its popularity would be that it was developed when the brain-hemispheric theories were popular and it is easy to replace the words lsquothink versus feel with lsquoleft brain versus right brainrsquo
1990rsquos John Philip Jones It is doing an injustice to the influence that Prof John Philip Jones has had on advertising theory to put lsquo1990rsquosrsquo before his name but as far as my story is concerned his part in the story of emotions and advertising is especially related to his book When Advertising Works Jones has written 12 marketing books in his career but none as important as When Advertising Works Incredible as it might sound but until this book was written there was no consistent evidence that advertising works There were a lot of case studies and also a general belief But no empirical generalized evidence With AC Nielsen Jones set up an experiment in which AC Nielsen collected data from 2000 households in the USA
1 The TV programs in the household using people-meters2 The brands they bought using hand held bar-code scanners3 Over a period of hellip4 For hellip brands
GET FROM THE ORIGINAL
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
They then analyzed for each brands purchase occasion whether the buyer had an opportunity to see an advertisement for the brand on television in their household The difference between the share of the brand in households that could have seen an advertisement in the past 7 days versus those that did not is called the hellipscore The difference was ascribed to the effect of the advertising He found that This might not even have been relevant to my story of advertising emotions and brand feelings In fact he spent a week holiday with Flemming Hansen and myself in South Africa and said that while we (Flemming and me) are interested in what happens inside the brain nothing is more important than measuring the inputs and outputs alone ndash one does not need to understand the working of the box in the middle Of course this was his way of being contentious in the middle of a discussion but it also reflects the arguments that psychologists had at the beginning of the 20th Century Do we study phenomena like Pavlovrsquos dog and learn what works in terms of input-output or do we try to speculate about the box in the middle Certainly most of Cognitive Psychology (the study of how we learn) is input-output and made big contributions to us bettering people When John was asked what were the things that distinguished advertisements that work better than others he said Which while it was a comment in the inputs also contained a speculation about the box and pointed toward the interaction between emotion and rational
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
1995- Joseph LeDoux From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Joseph E LeDoux (b 1949) a neuroscientist is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety multi-university Center in NYC devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans He received his PhD in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
LeDouxs research interests are mainly focused on the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion especially the mechanisms of fear
Books The Emotional Brain The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life 1996 Simon amp
Schuster 1998 Touchstone edition ISBN 0-684-83659-9
Synaptic Self How Our Brains Become Who We Are 2002 Penguin Putnam 2003 paperback ISBN 0-14-200178-3
His area of interest is lsquofear and anxietyrsquo and he explains how the limbic system forms part of these emotional responses His book lsquoThe Emotional Brainrsquo postulates that there is a neuronal lsquoshortcutrsquo in the brain which gets visual information to t he amygdala even bypassing the visual cortex Whether this is so is really not a concern of this book His real contribution to the history that we consider here is explaining in neurological terms the relationship between emotions and attention He might not have been the first scientist to explain this but he certainly popularized the insight
1995 And then came Prof Antonio Damasio I started this book saying that the story of emotions in advertising is as much about understanding the brain to explain what happens with brands and advertising as it is one of applying our understanding of advertising to understand the brain He is a central character in my story so I will not (again) explain here what he hypothesizes I merely place him in this lsquohistory reviewrsquo so that you can understand that the advertising models before this date cannot be blamed for differentiating between emotions and rationality because they were compiled while Descartes paradigm was the reigning paradigm
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
1997 Rossiter-Percy Grid This communications model is often referenced in marketing literature Because of its recency (and the fact that Larry Percy is a hellip) I have asked him to write a description for this book The Rossiter-Percy Grid (Rossiter and Percy 1997) considers the two essential communication objectives for all marketing communication brand awareness and brand attitude While the model is generally discussed only in terms of its brand attitude component it also posits brand awareness as a necessary objective for advertising prior to brand attitude The structure of the model is built upon the level of involvement in the purchase decision and the underlying motivation driving the decision It is informed by these criteria because each play a significant role in how the brain will process an advertising message and importantly will dictate different creative tactics to optimize that processing In the model involvement is defined in terms of risk (fiscal or psychological) either low or high When risk is low only attention and some low level learning mediated by emotion is required Brand attitude will follow from trial With high involvement decisions where there is risk involved the message must also be accepted A positive brand attitude must be established prior to purchase Motivation must be considered because this is what energizes purchase action Products are bought to satisfy either a negative motive such as problem-solution or problem avoidance or a positive motive such as sensory gratification or social approval (among others) The motives underlying behavior in a category are operatively distinct and will have different implications for message strategy and very specific emotions or emotional sequences will be associated with particular motivations With negative motives the negative emotion associated with an adverse event (eg a headache) will increase the motivational drive to lsquosolversquo the problem With resolution comes a positive emotional end-state All of this must be accounted for in the message strategy to ensure effective message processing In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with negative motives are referred to as informational When the underlying motives is positive the advertising strategy should focus upon appetitive or intrinsically rewarding events linking it to the brand by stimulating an authentic emotional response This positive emotional response becomes the brand benefit building brand attitude In the model the brand attitude strategies dealing with positive motives are referred to as transformational Combining the involvement and motivation dimensions of attitude yield the four quadrants of the Rossiter-Percy Grid (see figure) Informational brand attitude strategies deal with negatively reinforcing motives with different creative tactics necessary for the emotional portrayal of the motive and benefit-claim support for perceived brand delivery depending upon the perceived risk for the product target audience and brand choice functionally dichotomized into low versus high involvement Transformational brand attitude strategies deal with positively reinforcing motives also with correspondingly different creative tactics What the model underscores is that owing to the way in which the mind deals with information the level of involvement in underlying motivation for a decision will necessarily dictate brand
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
attitude strategy for advertising and when involvement is low the target audience need not be lsquosoldrsquo only interested when high they must be convinced by the message When the underlying motive is negative the key is in the information provided by the message when positive the lsquoemotional authenticityrsquo of the execution is the key
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Robert Heath Many people know that I disagree with the conclusions that Robert Heath has come to but this does not mean that he has not been a very important personality in the story of advertising emotions Robert published ldquohelliprdquo in 200x which in structure was very similar to my book The Advertised Mind Both of us reviewed the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness starting with a section 1 being strongly based on the theories of Damasio Both of us then had a section 2 where we explored the implications of this for advertising and research Our section 1rsquos could not have been more similar other than our interpretation of whether Krugman was right Our section 2 and conclusions could not have been more diametrically opposed if we had planned it In essence
Robert argued the power of emotions in advertising and that advertising is a Low Involvement Process hence the power of emotions and hence the inability of research techniques like recall to measure the advertising effects
I argued the opposite based on advertising being a low involvement process and the role of emotions being to increase attention and therefore making it measurable also via recall
In the first edition of the model Robert used the terms lsquoLow Involvement Processesrsquo and lsquoHigh Involvement Processesrsquo but found people confuse his model with the FCB brain-grid terminologies and he the changed this to Low Attention Processes versus High Attention Processes I would argue that Roberts background of being inside agencies and arguing against copy-testers like Millward Brown has left him with an inner bias against Millward Brown arguments Robert told me he believes I am biased in my views by Millward Brown philosophies I pointed out that I wrote The Advertised Mind before my involvement with Millward Brown The argument continues and this is good We are learning about the brain we donrsquot know much and need speculating and disagreement to keep us all sober about what we are learning
2005 ndash Erik du Plessis lsquoThe Advertised MindrsquoMy book appeared in 2005 and would be considered with Robert Heathrsquos as one of the first books reporting on Damassiorsquos insights In this I describe the COMMAP model of advertising which was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1995 which was well before Prof Damassio published The research
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
on which the model was based had nothing to do about views that differentiate between emotions and rationality Yet the resultant model shows the interaction that exist between these two I will devote a chapter to this later
2007 - Flemming Hansen
AWAITING FLEMMING TO SEND A WRITE-UP OF HIS MODEL Professor Flemming Hansen of the Copenhagen Business School is a leading light in the business of understanding consumers and the author of one of the first books on Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour is a subject in all courses of marketing and is the intersection between marketing theory and other disciplines like psychology and economics For obvious reasons this is the area where marketing is now intersecting with neurology and the neuro-sciences like neuro-economics neuro-psychology etc Like I Flemming does not like the term neuro-marketing because it has already in its short life set up negative journalism as I indicated at the start of my book ldquoBuy-buttonsrdquo etc He came up with the term neuro-decision making which is much more to the point Currently he is heading the Decision Neuroscience Research Group at the Copenhagen Business School They have all the physiological measuring instruments that are applied to this new area of investigation and have neuro-psychologists like Dr Thomas Ramsoy in the department In 2007 he published Emotions Advertising and Consumer Choice This is not only the basic text for emotions in marketing measures but is a report on a study on emotions and brands What Flemming did with TNS in Denmark was to measure brands using only lsquoemotionalrsquo words and to track the brand perceptions over a year Also to relate shifts in the emotional measures back to in market performance and activities Not only was the study done on a large sample but it was verified by what happened during the year under consideration It is a truly magnificent piece of work In terms of the story that I am telling about brand feelings one should not begin to under-estimate what Flemming managed to achieve The subject of neuro-marketing is now popular and many conferences are run on this and there are people showing brain-scans of subjects considering brands All of these are only verified by
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
asking people questions about the brands and then showing that the brain-scan pictures verify the answers to the questions people were asked Graham Pagersquos award winning paper at the xxx ESOMAR conference is exactly arguing this point ldquoWe are verifying the observations from brain scans and other technology by asking people questions We can only interpret the pictures of the brain at this stage based on what people tell us At this stage brain pictures does not tell us anything other than what we firstly find out by asking questions The pictures verify what we suppose about the brainrdquo
The objective of our understanding brain research is not to find a way that we will push a thousand respondents into a fMRI machine to find out whether our advertisement of new brand will work The objective is to understand how feelings work and then to ask better research questions (and interpret them better) and how this can improve marketing This is what Flemming proved can be done in his experiment with TNS Starting from zero-base and only using feeling dimensions he measured the brands predicted their market share and then their market share changes in the next year relative to their marketing activities ldquoA small step for man a big step for marketingrdquo
2008 - Martin Lindstrom and lsquoBuy-ology ndash how everything we knew about why we buy is wrongrsquo In my opinion in many ways what Martin Lindstrom did with his book buy-ology is wrong But it is destined to be a part of neuro-marketingrsquos history It is based on a an amazing study involving 2000 volunteers using the latest in brain-scanning technology that cost $7million (Ie an amazing $3 5000 per respondent) and was done in several countries Of these 200 were scanned using fMRI In essence they considered the brain-scans and jumped to conclusions rather than consider what is known about why we buy brands and what is known about the brain to interpret their brain measurements
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumerMarketers achieve these goals by providingproduct designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created After a product emerges on the marketplace marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings choices pricing advertising and promotionsIn their attempts to provide these types of inputs marketers use a range of market research techniques from focus groups and individual surveys to actual market tests mdash with many approaches in between (see Supplementary information S1 (box))In general the simpler approaches (focusgroups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases and are therefore seen as not very accurate1ndash4 The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement such as market tests provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost and the product production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes which include simulated markets conjoint analyses markets for information and incentive-compatible pricing studies (see Supplementary information S1 (box)) As in all compromises these approachesprovide solutions with intermediate levelsof cost simplicity realism and quality ofdata (TABLE 1)The incorporation of neuroimaging intothe decision-making sciences mdash for example neuroeconomics mdash has spread to the realm of marketing As a result there are highhopes that neuroimaging technology could solve some of the problems that marketers face A prominent hope is that neuroimaging will both streamline marketingprocesses and save money Another hope is that neuroimaging will reveal information about consumer preferences that is unobtainable through conventional methods Ofcourse with such high expectations there is the accompanying hype Several popular books and articles have been published that push a neuromarketing agenda and there are now a handful of companies that market neuromarketing itself5 In this Perspective we aim to distinguish the legitimate hopes from the marketing hype As such we hope that this article serves the dual purpose of recognizing the real potential of neuro imaging in business and providing a guide for potential buyers and sellers of such servicesWhy use brain imaging for marketing
Marketers are excited about brain imaging for two main reasons First marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more efficient trade-off between costs and benefitsThis hope is based on the assumptions that people cannot fully articulate their preferences when asked to express them explicitly and that consumersrsquo brains contain hidden information about their true preferencesSuch hidden information could in theorybe used to influence their buying behaviour so that the cost of performing neuroimaging studies would be outweighed by the benefit of improved product design and increased sales In theory at least brain imaging could illuminate not only what people like but alsowhat they will buyThus far this approach to neuromarketing has focused on this post-design application in particular on measuring the effectivenessof advertising campaigns The general approach has been to show participants a product advertisement either in the formof a print advertisement or commercial and
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
measure the brainrsquos response in the form of a blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) measurement which is taken as a proxy for neural activationThe second reason why marketers are excited about brain imaging is that they hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product exists (FIG 1) The assumption is that neuroimaging datawould give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data from standard market research studies and would remain insensitive to the types of biases that are often a hallmark of subjective approaches to valuations If this is indeed the case product concepts could be tested rapidly and those that are not promising eliminated early in the process This would allow more efficient allocation of resources to develop only promising products Thus the issue of whether neuroimaging can play a useful part in any aspect of marketing depends on three fundamental questionswhich we will address in this paper First can neuromarketing reveal hidden information that is not apparent in other approachesSecond can neuromarketing provide a more efficient costndashbenefit trade-off than other marketing research approaches Third can neuromarketing provide early informationabout product designRevealing hidden informationBrain activity and preference measurementAllowing for the assumption in neuromarketing that the brain contains hidden information about preferences it is reasonableto set aside for the moment the issue of lsquohiddenrsquo and ask what relationships are known to exist between brain activity andexpressed (that is not hidden) preference As it turns out different methods of eliciting a personrsquos preference often result indifferent estimations of that preference3467science and society
Neuromarketing the hope and hypeof neuroimaging in businessDan Ariely and Gregory S BernsAbstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing mdashneuromarketing mdash has recently gained considerable popularity We propose thatthere are two main reasons for this trend First the possibility that neuroimagingwill become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods and second thehope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is notobtainable through conventional marketing methods Although neuroimaging isunlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future there is growing evidence
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience The mostpromising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before aproduct is even released mdash when it is just an idea being developed
PersPectives284 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedThis makes it difficult to know which method provides the truest measure oflsquodecision utilityrsquo (that is the expected utilitywhich would ultimately drive choice in themarketplace) It is clear that market tests givethe most accurate answer but having to runa market test on every product would defeatthe purpose of market research mdash namely to provide early and cheap informationSimilarly we suspect (and economists are certain) that methods that are incentive compatible are better than methods thatare not Incentive-compatible elicitation methods are methods that encourage the participant to truthfully reveal what isbeing asked of him because to do so would maximize the participantrsquos satisfaction (forexample he would earn the most moneyor receive the product he likes the best) In other words it is in the participantrsquos interest to answer product-related questions truthfullyHowever using such methods is not always possibleOne important question for the potential of neuromarketing is whether the neural signal at the time of or slightly before the decision (assumed to be ameasure of decision utility) can be a good predictor of the pleasure or reward at the time of consumption (the lsquoexperienced utilityrsquo)8 A second question is whether thelink between these two signals holds even when the preference elicitation methodsare not incentive compatible If the answer to both of these questions is positive neuromarketing could become useful for measuring preferencesMeasurements such as willingness to pay (WTP) have only recently come under functional MrI (fMrI) examination In one experiment subjects bid on the right to eat snacks during the experiment The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC)910 Interestingly similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasanttaste11 look at pretty faces12 hear pleasant music13 receive money1415 and experience a social reward1617 Such generally close correspondence in regional brain activitybetween the anticipation of rewarding events the consumption of enjoyable goods and the willingness to pay for them suggests that the representation of expected utility may rely in part on the systems that evaluate the quality of the consumption experience The theme of common systems for expectation and experience also appliesto things that are unpleasant or even painful (although this involves a different network including the insula)18ndash21 Such similarities suggest that neuroimaging can become a usefultool in measuring preferences particularly when incentive
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
compatibility is important but there is no easy way to achieve it (for example when the products have not been created)However such similarities do not necessarily mean that brain activation is the same across different elicitation methods and there are differences between the neural activation representing decision utility andthat representing experienced utility142223This caveat aside the generally close correspondence does suggest that neural activitymight be used as a proxy for WTPin situations in which WTP cannot easily be determined mdash although this has yet to be demonstratedReverse inference and reward The practice of measuring an increase in BOLD activityin a region such as the ventral striatum orOFC and then concluding that a lsquorewardrelatedrsquo process was active has become increasingly common This form of deductivereasoning is known as lsquoreverse inferencersquo2425 Given the readiness of many to interpret brain activation as evidence of aspecific mental process it is worth examining this type of inference using a Bayesian analysis it is possible to estimate the specificity of activation in a particular region of the brain for a specific cognitive process For example Poldrack used the BrainMap database to analyse the frequency of activation of Brocarsquos area in language studies24 He found that activation of Brocarsquos area implied a Bayes factor of 23 for language involvement which means that taking brain activity intoaccount can make a small but significantTable 1 | comparison of selected marketing research approachesFocus groups PreferencequestionnairesSimulated choicemethodsMarket testsWhat is measured Open-ended answersbody language andbehaviour not suitable forstatistical analysisImportance weighting forvarious product attributesChoices among products Decision to buy andchoice among productsType of response process Speculative except whenused to assess prototypesThe respondent must tryto determine his decisionweightings throughintrospection then mapthose weightings into theresponse scaleA hypothetical choiceso the same process asthe actual purchase mdashbut without monetaryconsequencesAn actual choice withcustomersrsquo own moneyand therefore fullyconsequentialTypical use in new-productdevelopment processesEarly on to aid generalproduct design at user
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
interface design forusability studiesDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantDesign phase whendetermining customertrade-offs is importantmay also be used as aforecasting toolEnd of process to forecastsales and measurethe response to otherelements of marketingsuch as priceCost and competitive risk Low cost risk comes onlyfrom misuse of data by thesellerModerate cost andsome risk of alertingcompetitorsModerate cost (higherif using prototypesinstead of descriptions)and some risk of alertingcompetitorsHigh cost and high risk ofalerting competitors plusthe risk of the productbeing reverse engineeredbefore launchTechnical skill required Moderation skills forinside the group andethnographic skills forobservers and analystsQuestionnaire design andstatistical analysisExperiment designand statistical analysis(including choicemodelling)Running an instrumentedmarket and forecasting(highly specialized)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 285copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedNature Reviews | NeurosciencefMRIfMRIConceptMarket analysisfeasibilityDesignbull Developmentbull PrototypingTestingReleaseDeliverySupportFeedbackAdvertisingimprovement to onersquos prior estimate ofwhether a language process was involvedMany studies have shown that striatal
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
activity correlates with hedonic ratingscales26 neuromarketers have been quickto invert this finding and use ventral striatalactivity as an indication that an individuallikes something but what is the evidence forthis using Poldrackrsquos method to analyse theBrainMap database we estimated the posteriorprobability for a reward process giventhe observation of nucleus accumbens (nAc)activation27 The prior probability of engaginga reward-related process was assumed tobe 05 (11 odds) According to this estimationbased on the number of fMrI papersreported in the BrainMap database withand without lsquorewardrsquo and with and withoutnAc activation nAc activation increasesthe probability of a reward-related processtaking place to 090 (odds 91) This yieldsa Bayes factor of 9 which is consideredmoderate to strong evidence for a causalrelationship (BOX 1) Although meaningfulin a statistical sense the assumptions behindsuch a calculation are rather liberal andmay suffer from a publication bias for positiveresults as well as differing definitionsof reward In real-world settings the abilityto infer whether an individual likes somethingbased on nAc activation alone may besubstantially lessIn the context of a product likeabilityexperiment Knutson et al found significantcorrelations between nAc activity andproduct preferences in college students28However in logistic regression (r2) calculationsaimed at predicting consumer choiceself-reported preferences outperformedbrain activation alone Adding brain activationto a logistic model improved predictionsbut only slightly (increasing r2 from0528 to 0533) re-analysis with moresophisticated machine-learning algorithmsfurther improved the predictive value ofbrain activation29Although some have argued for the existenceof a ldquobuy buttonrdquo in the brain5 currentevidence suggests that the cognitive processesassociated with purchase decisions aremulti factorial and cannot be reduced to asingle area of activation Conversely a givenbrain region may be involved in multiplecognitive processes A recent review of valuebaseddecision making divided the processof making a choice into five categories representationof the decision assignment ofvalue to different actions action selectionoutcome evaluation and learning30 evenwithin this simplified framework currentdata suggest that responses to marketingefforts and consumer choices depend onan array of neurobiological processes andthat no single brain region is responsible
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
for a consumer choice But is it possible thatsome brain regions are more involved thanothers Because the field of neuroeconomicsgrew out of early brain-imaging studies ofthe neurobiology of reward3132 most of theneuroeconomic data are about valuationmechanisms and the associated responsesof dopamine-rich brain regions The OFCand striatum have been consistently implicatedin goal-directed action92233ndash35 It is alsogenerally accepted that the insula has a keyrole in physiological arousal which is typicallyalthough not exclusively aversive innature21 But because of the reverse inferenceproblem using striatal and OFC activityas a read-out of lsquolikingrsquo and the insula as alsquodisgust-meterrsquo is probably too simplistic tobe of use in a real-life setting In the contextof neuromarketing the statistical power ofthese single-region correlations may be toolow for the correlations to be of use as predictorsof consumption unless perhaps theneuroimaging data is combined with othermeasures of preferencefMRI as a brain decoder Given the limitedpower of reverse inference from singleregionbrain activations more data-drivenmethods for interpreting brain imagingdata have been at the forefront of analysistechniques These techniques treat sites ofbrain activity agnostically mdash that is withoutreference to prior hypotheses The primaryassumption is that regardless of how anindividualrsquos brain represents informationit does so consistently The representationsmay be spatially dispersed and theymay be distributed differently in differentindividuals but they can still be reliablydetected through multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) Because MVPA methods arenot reliant on the activation of a small subsetof brain regions they have substantiallyincreased sensitivity to detect activation36A crucial advantage of MVPA techniquesover approaches in which activation in aparticular brain region of interest is measuredis that MVPA has the statistical powerto predict the individual choices of a subjectBecause MVPA involves statistical associationsof complex activation patterns thatoccur when an individual choice is beingmade it does not depend on the vagariesof an experimenter interpreting the meaningof an activation map Some of the mostimpressive demonstrations of MVPA havebeen in decoding visual responses to simplestimuli37ndash39 and subsequently to watchingfilms40 the meanings of nouns41 eventboundaries of written narratives42 and citynavigation4344Figure 1 | Product development cycle Neuromarketing applications of functional MRI (fMRI) can
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
potentially enter into the product development cycle in two places In the first fMRI can be used aspart of the design process itself Here neural responses could be used to refine the product before itis released In the second fMRI can be used after the product is fully designed typically to measureneural responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales
PersPectives286 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedIt is possible even likely that such methodswill soon be able to handle almost anycircumstance that can be created in an MrIenvironment With increasing stimulus complexitysimple interpretations of brain activationwill become more difficult Howeverfor real-world marketing applications itmay be more important to predict futurebehaviour than to understand the lsquowhyrsquoof behaviour Such a data-driven applicationof imaging (perhaps even lacking an underlyingtheory) is analogous to identifying agenetic polymorphism associated with a particularcancer without understanding whatthat gene does mdash which is likely to yieldspecific but not general insightscosts and benefitsAs noted above it is not yet clear whetherneuroimaging provides better data thanother marketing methods (TABLE 1) butthrough the use of MVPA methods it mightbe possible to reveal the lsquoholy grailrsquo of hiddeninformation Assuming that this is thecase will using expensive neuroimagingultimately be more efficient than usingcheaper methods Typical charges for scanningin a university research setting averageabout uS$500 per hour In a commercialsetting these will be higher Howeveractual scan charges account for a small portionof the total cost with personnel andoverhead expenses accounting for at least75 of the costs of an imaging project Ifneuromarketing is to compete with conventionalmarketing approaches on the basisof efficiency then the costs of labour andoverheads will have to be reducedOne area in which the cost of neuroimagingcan be compared with conventionalmarketing approaches is in the post-designphase the goal of which is to increase salesof an existing product mdash for examplethrough advertisements and other typesof framing effects early neuromarketingstudies therefore used imaging approachesto evaluate consumer responses to advertisementsAt this point it is importantto distinguish between neural responses tothe consumption of a product (that isexperienced utility) and neural responsesto representations of the product that maylead to future consumption Only certaintypes of products can be consumed inan MrI scanner Therefore much of the
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
post-design neuromarketing literature hasfocused on brain responses to visual representationsof products such as pictures2845
or advertisements for the product46ndash48however these advertisement studieswhich used magneto encephalographyand electroencephal ography (BOX 2) didnot link imaging data to actual purchasedecisions or other ratings so it is not yetpossible to determine the value of thisapproachThe role of expectations It has long beenknown that the manner in which choicesare presented can have a dramatic effect ondecisions49 This is where advertisementsand product placement come into play Todate experiments have examined fairlysimple choices and responses to things thatcan be presented in an MrI scanner Beforeneuroimaging can be used to predict consumerchoice a greater understanding ofthe interplay between the decision maker theelicitation method and the decision contextis neededBOLD responses are influenced byso-called lsquoexpectationrsquo effects which includepricing effects biases in the way the choiceis presented50 and placebo responses Thissuggests that neuromarketing could behelpful in identifying individual differencesin consumer reactions to different types ofinputs In a study of neural responses to sipsof wine medial OFC responses were higherwhen subjects were told that the wine wasexpensive ($90 per bottle) versus inexpensive($5 per bottle)23 Activity in this regionalso correlated with self-report ratings ofhow much participants liked the wine eventhough all wines were actually the sameThese results suggest that the instantaneousexperience of pleasure from a product mdashthat is experienced utility mdash is influencedby pricing and that this effect may be mediatedby the medial OFC9 This result parallelsa similar behavioural finding that thestrength of the placebo effect for analgesia isgreater for more expensive lsquomedicationsrsquo51Subjectsrsquo expectations also play an importantpart in how the experimenter shouldinterpret striatal responses Many studieshave shown that the reward-related signalsin the ventral striatum and nAc can bemore accurately linked to prediction errorsfor reward than to reward itself225253Placebo responses are an interestingaspect of neuromarketing The mechanismof the placebo response has beendebated for decades54 but ultimately it canbe considered an effect of marketing (thatis the actions of a doctor pharmaceuticalcompany or experimenter) The neural
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
correlates of the analgesic placebo effectare widespread but generally point to amodulation of the cortical pain matrixin the brain5556 Because consumers cannotconsciously report placebo effectsthe demonstration of neural correlates ofthese effects suggests that having access tohidden brain information could enable amarketer to measure the effectiveness ofa placebo marketing strategy in a particularindividual How well this type of informationgeneralizes to a larger population willdetermine the costndashbenefit ratio of doingneuroimagingThe aforementioned manipulations ofexpectations are simple and direct Forexample the experimenter can manipulatea single dimension of expectation such asprice or descriptive words (for exampleldquoultrardquo and ldquonew and improvedrdquo) andmeasure the effect on the consumer behaviourallyand neurally More cognitively complexforms of expectations can be createdthrough advertisements and commercialsBox 1 | NAc activation in studies of tasks with and without rewardThe BrainMap database was searched for functional MRI studies with and without a reward taskand with and without nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation The NAc was defined as a bilateralregion of interest with vertices from MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) coordinates (ndash12 0 ndash12)to (12 12 0) The frequencies that were obtained are shown in the table belowAssuming that the prior probability of engaging in a reward-related process is 05 calculationsshowed that NAc activation increases the probability of a reward-related process taking place to090 yielding a Bayes factor of 9Probability of NAc activation given a reward task = 2768 = 0397Probability of NAc activation given no reward task = 591283 = 0046Assuming the prior probability of reward = 05 thenProbability of a reward task given NAc activation =104859410485941048594104859410485941048594 1048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594104859410485941048594reward task No reward taskNAc activated 27 59NAc not activated 41 1224
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 287copy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedPost-design applications of neuroimaginghave for the most part confirmed whatwas known about the behavioural effects ofproduct placement which bypass the counter-arguments in which people naturallyengage when facing advertisements Theimaging studies confirm that there are neuralcorrelates of exposure to advertisementsbut do not directly suggest that maximizingactivity in a particular brain region resultsin more salesCulture and advertising neuroimagingis often hyped as an exciting new toolfor advertisers Despite its enormouscost advertising effectiveness is a poorlyunderstood area of marketing Althoughadvertising has been investigated in a fewneuroimaging studies5758 it is still unknown
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
whether neuroimaging can prospectivelyreveal whether an advertisement will beeffective In a famous CokendashPepsi study participantswho described themselves as Cokedrinkers showed significant activation in thehippocampus and right dorsolateral PFCwhen they were cued about the upcomingdrink of Coke45 Self-described Pepsi drinkersdid not have this response In the absenceof brand information there was no significantdifference in preference during a tastetest The study suggested that any differencesin the response (behavioural and neural) tothe two brands must be culturally derivedOne possibility is that brands achieve a lifeof their own by becoming animate objectssometimes with human attributes in theminds of consumers However one fMrIstudy that compared brain responses topersons and brands found that activationpatterns for brands differed from thosefor people mdash even for brands with whichsubjects are identified mdash suggesting thatbrands are not perceived in the same wayas people59 Another possibility is that specificemotions can be elicited in responseto advertisements although whether neuroimagingwill help to reveal these emotionsmay ultimately be limited by reverseinference constraints especially if tied tospecific regionsThe issue of how culturally derived identitiesbecome embedded in the brain is ofgreat interest not only from a marketingperspective Although neoclassical economictheory describes a framework in which individualsassess costs and benefits during theirdecision-making processes it is clear thatpeople base many decisions on socioculturalrules and identities Some are in a commercialcontext (for example ldquoI am a PCrdquo or ldquoIam a Macrdquo) but many are not (for exampleldquoI am a Democratrdquo or ldquoI am a republicanrdquo)These issues extend beyond the mundanequestions of advertisement effectiveness andraise the more profound question of how themarketing of ideas affects decision makingBut whether neuroimaging provides anefficient tool to answer this question has yetto be shownearly product designAs the ability of neuroimaging to predict orinfluence post-design purchase decisionsseems to be limited (see above) neuroimagingmay be better suited to gaugingresponses before products are marketedThe primary reason is that neuroimagingmay yield insights into the productexperience itselfFood products Various food products andbeverages have been administered in the
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
MrI scanner from simple sugar solutionsto chocolate wine sports drinks and colasBeverages are particularly easy to administerwith the usual route through a computercontrolledpump attached to a tube thatdelivers controlled amounts of fluid intothe participantrsquos mouth The perceptionof flavour is a multisensory integrationprocess and thus provides several opportunitiesfor neuroimaging to disentangle acomplex perception that subjects might notbe able to articulate taste odour textureappearance and even sound all contributeto the gustatory experience These differentdimensions have been mapped ontoBo x 2 | Neuromarketing technologiesFunctional Mri (fMri)The technique uses an MRI scanner to measure the blood oxygenation level-dependent(BOLD) signal The BOLD changes are generally correlated with the underlying synaptic activitySpatial resolution is 1ndash10 mm and temporal resolution is 1ndash10 s In general the higher the spatialresolution the lower the temporal resolution Of the three imaging technologies described in thisBox fMRI has a substantial advantage in resolving small structures and those that are deep in thebrain However some important brain regions especially the orbitofrontal cortex are affected bysignal artefacts that may reduce the ability to obtain useful information State of the art MRIscanners cost approximately US$1 million per Tesla and have annual operating costs of$100000ndash$300000electroencephalography (eeG)EEG uses electrodes applied to the scalp and measures changes in the electrical field in the brainregion underneath EEG has very high temporal resolution (milliseconds) and can therefore detectbrief neuronal events Because the skull disperses the electrical field EEG has low spatial resolution(~1 cm) that depends on how many electrodes are used The number of electrodes can be as few astwo or range up to hundreds in high-density arrays The greater the number of electrodes thebetter the spatial resolution Apart from the low spatial resolution EEG has poor sensitivity for deepbrain structures Equipment costs can be low (lt$10000) but increase with high-density arrays andthe concomitant resources needed to process the data A common technique is to measure theleftndashright asymmetry of the frontal EEG78 This is typically measured by the power in the alpha band(8ndash13 Hz) This research has suggested that relatively greater activity in the left frontal region isassociated with either positive emotional states or the motivational drive to approach an object79Although there are strong correlations between frontal EEG asymmetry and personality traits thedegree to which the asymmetry changes from moment to moment is still debated Some havesuggested a minimum of 60 s to reliably estimate power asymmetry80 in which case the temporaladvantage of EEG over fMRI is lost Although some have used this approach to measure momentaryfluctuations in emotion in response to advertisements81 without accounting for autocorrelations intime or multiple statistical comparisons the validity of such approaches is dubiousMagnetoencephalography (MeG)An expensive cousin of EEG MEG measures changes in the magnetic fields induced by neuronalactivity Thus MEG has the same advantage of high temporal resolution and because the magneticfield is less distorted by the skull than is the electrical field it has better spatial resolution than EEGLike EEG MEG is most sensitive to superficial cortical signals (primarily in the sulci) MEG requires amagnetically shielded room and superconducting quantum interference detectors to measure theweak magnetic signals in the brain An MEG set-up costs approximately $2 millionTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)TMS uses an iron core often in the shape of a toroid wrapped in electrical wire to create amagnetic field strong enough to induce electrical currents in underlying neurons when placed onthe head82 TMS can be used as a single pulse paired pulse or repetitive stimulation and theneuronal effects range from facilitation to inhibition of synaptic transmission As a research toolTMS has been used to study the causal role of specific brain regions in particular tasks bytemporarily taking them lsquoofflinersquo
PersPectives288 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserveddistinct brain regions but with substantialoverlap6061 The OFC is consistently linkedto perceived pleasantness whereas viscosityand fat content seem to be represented
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
in the insula62 The use of neuroimagingby commercial manufacturers to designa more appealing food product is bothfeasible and likely For this to work howeverone would need to identify whichdimension of gustation is to be studied (forexample taste odour or texture) and maximizea brain response to variations in thatdimensionThe drawback to such an approach is thepossibility of creating food products that areso highly tuned to neural responses thatindividuals may over-eat and become obese(see BOX 3 for a discussion of some ethicalissues related to neuromarketing) Is itpossible that such a neuroimaging approachcould create a lsquosuper-heroin of foodrsquo mdash aproduct so delicious that all but the mostascetic individuals would find it irresistibleIt is an extreme but real possibility Howeverthat does not mean that neuroimaging isnecessarily problematic for food productdevelopment Indeed the same techniquescould be applied to making nutritious foodsmore appealingEntertainment As a typical big-budgetHollywood film costs over $100 millionwith almost as much spent on marketing itwould be surprising if film producers werenot interested in using neuroimaging toimprove their product After static imagesfilms are probably the easiest product topresent in the scanner Moreover an fMrImeasurement is time locked to the filmtimeline A film presents the same basic visualand auditory stimuli to everyone viewingit and thus should serve as a cognitive synchronizerIndeed an fMrI study of subjectsviewing a segment of the classic WesternThe Good the Bad and the Ugly40 showedthat large extents of the cortex respondedsimilarly in time across subjects suggestingthat much of the cortical response is essentiallystereotypical In another study theability to recall narrative content of the TVsitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weekslater was correlated with the strength ofhippocampal and temporal lobe responsesduring viewing63Such stereotypical responses suggest thatfMrI could be used during the editing processFor example different cuts of a moviecould be measured against these corticalresponses which could then be used to selectthe final cut for release Although it seemshopelessly complex to interpret such brainresponses it may not be necessary if the onlygoal is to release the most profitable movieProvided there were a metric of quality (forexample box office returns or test audiencereports) brain activation patterns could
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
be chosen to optimize outcomes withoutany knowledge of what the patterns meantSeveral neuromarketing companies have targetedtheir efforts towards the entertainmentindustry but as most of this work is unpublishedit is difficult to evaluate the quality ofthe product However guidelines for generalquality of scientific work can be formulatedbased on two decades of neuroscienceresearch Thus without passing judgment onwhether neuromarketing works we can atleast identify the items to look for in a qualityoperation (BOX 4)Box 3 | The ethics of neuromarketingThe introduction of neuroimaging into an environment in which the ultimate goal is to sell moreproduct to the consumer may raise ethical issuesbull Businesses will be able to read the minds of consumers This concern is about the privacy ofthoughts Can neuroimaging be used to gauge a personrsquos preferences outside of the specific taskbeing performed Possibly This concern may be mitigated through transparency of purposesubjects must know what kind of endeavour they are helping and their data should only be usedfor that purposebull Private versus public information about preferences Individuals need to be able to exercise controlover what they choose to reveal about their personal preferences A privacy breach occurs ifneuroimaging reveals a private preference that is outside the scope of the neuromarketerrsquosresearch questionbull Information will be used to discriminate against individuals or exploit particular neurological traitsfound in a subgroup of individuals Neuroimaging data could potentially target marketing tospecific people or groups Many people would find this tactic repugnant because it exploits abiological lsquoweaknessrsquo that only exists in some people Similarly this information could be usedto time pricing moves to capitalize on individual weaknesses that are known to coincide withparticular biological states (for example raising beverage prices when someone is known tobe thirsty)bull Central versus peripheral routes of influence A central route aims to influence consumersrsquopreferences about the functional aspects of the product (for example fewer calories in a beer)A peripheral route attempts to manipulate preferences through things that are peripherally relatedto the product (for example sex appeal of people in advertisements) Neuroimaging couldpotentially be used to enhance both types of influence but some consider the attempts tooptimize the peripheral route more ethically dubiousbull Brain responses obtained from a small group of subjects will be used to generalize to a largepopulation Of course this is done all the time in the scientific literature If neuromarketing dataare used in product design and the product injures someone neuroimaging will be partly to blamebull Abnormal findings Approximately 1 of the population will have an abnormality on their MRI83 Ina population without clinical symptoms the clinical significance of an MRI abnormality is unknownMany will be false positives others will be real and require referral Currently there is no standardfor how to handle these situations However it is standard practice to have a written policy inplace for abnormal findings Failure to do so opens both the neuromarketing firm and their clientsto medical liabilitybull A lack of regulation Traditional marketing methods because they are not typically viewed asexperimentation have not been subject to institutional review board (IRB) oversight MRI scans areapproved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use but because no diagnosisis being made in a marketing setting there is the potential to circumvent both FDA and IRBrequirements The burgeoning neuromarketing industry would be well advised to adopt anindustry standard of independent review Clients should demand itbull Management of perceptions How will the public react when they discover that neuroimaging hasbeen used to design or market a product The publicrsquos response to genetically modified food couldprovide an indicationbull Companies might not be primarily concerned with the best interests of the consumer Companiesand consumers maintain complex relationships in which some of their goals are compatible whileothers are in conflict On the one hand companies seek to design manufacture and sell productsthat consumers seek to buy resulting in compatible goals that benefit both parties On the otherhand companies also aim to maximize their short- or long-term profits sometimes to thedetriment of their consumers Much like marketing itself understanding consumer preferencescan be used for goals that are in the best interests of both the company and their consumers or forobjectives that are in the interests of the company and to the detriment of their consumers Whichapproaches neuromarketers choose is an open question
PersPectives
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
nATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 289copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reservedArchitecture A growing number of neuroscientistsand architects have begun toconsider the relationships of the brain to thearchitectural experience64 The neuroscienceof architecture could be considered from twoperspectives first the neural activity associatedwith seeing specific aspects of a buildingand second the use of neural responsesto guide the architectural design processClearly one would need to identify these neuralresponses before attempting to use themin architectural design but it is precisely theapplication in design that places neuroimagingwithin the neuromarketing frameworkVirtual reality can provide a surprisinglyaccurate simulation of an architectural experienceand can be used in an MrI scanner Ithas already been used to understand neuralactivation during automobile driving6566In spatial navigation tasks such as drivingand presumably navigating a building thehippo campus has a key role These earlyvirtual reality experiments suggested thatthe hippocampus is active when the subjectmakes navigation decisions but not whenthey are externally cued65 Perhaps taking intoaccount lsquohippocampal loadrsquo may be a usefultool in architectural design mdash for example tomake buildings easier to navigate extendingthis idea by considering the neurobiologicalchanges associated with ageing it might bepossible to design buildings and retirementcommunities that mitigate the memory lossassociated with Alzheimerrsquos diseasePolitical candidates Finally neuromarketingmight be applied to perhaps the greatest marketingcampaign of all politics Accordingto the Federal election Commission (seeFurther information) the cost of the 2008 uSPresidential race was approximately $16billion It was also around that time that neuroimagingmade its way into politics perhapsmost prominently in the form of a New YorkTimes op-ed piece67 Peer-reviewed studieshave shown a complex pattern of activationin response to statements about candidatesthese patterns have been interpreted as evidencethat motivated reasoning involves activationin the ventromedial PFC the anteriorcingulate cortex the posterior cingulate cortexand the insula68 Subsequent studies havesuggested that activation of the medial PFCmight be associated with maintaining asubjectrsquos preference for a candidate inresponse to advertisements whereas activityin the lateral PFC might be associated withchanging candidates69In marketing terms the political candidatesare the products that must be sold tothe electorate Therefore like other products
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
candidates and their campaigns have preandpost-design phases Political marketingis aimed at selling an existing candidate butwith more foresight can also be used tolsquodesignrsquo a better candidate The aforementionedneuroimaging studies have focusedon the post-design responses to advertisementsfor political candidates6869Could neuroimaging also be used todesign a candidate Although potentialnominees already go through a lsquogroomingrsquoprocess it is worth examining this prospectA candidatersquos appearance trustworthinessand message content might determine avoterrsquos decision Considerable neuroimagingwork has been done on the perceptionof human faces70 and features such as facialsymmetry skin colour and attractivenessKey brain structures in visual processinginclude the fusiform face area for basicface processing71 the superior temporalsulcus for gaze direction and intentionand the nAc for attractiveness12 A recentstudy on the effect of political candidatesrsquoappearance found that insula activation inresponse to seeing a picture of a candidatewas associated with a greater likelihoodof that candidate losing the election72 Inaddition dorsolateral PFC and anteriorcingulate cortex activation occurred whensubjects viewed images of a candidateof a political party different from theirown73 The neurobiology of trust has alsobecome quite popular to study with bothfMrI and more recently pharmacologicalBo x 4 | What to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firmWe provide a list which is by no means exhaustive of what could be considered standardpractice in the application of neuroimaging methods in cognitive neuroscience and relatedfields It is based on standard criteria for reviewing research proposals and adapted to abusiness settingbull What is to be gained from neuroimaging Good neuromarketers will begin by discussing the prosand cons of the proposal in detail For example what will neuroimaging yield over traditionalmethods Ask for data about the predictive value of neuroimaging findings in a real-world settingbull What are the dependent and independent measurements Assessing brain activation is notgenerally useful without correlating it with some other measurement It is necessary to haveanother behavioural measurement to anchor the interpretation of the brain activation Be wary ifsomeone claims to know what a person thinks based solely on brain activationbull How many subjects are needed Apart from the simplest of tasks any task invoking a responsethat is expected to vary across individuals demands a sample size of at least 30 (REF 84) If groupsof individuals are being compared under different treatments or conditions the sample size willneed to be much greater to detect differences between groups and between different treatmentsbull What is the nature of the stimuli Simple stimuli are the easiest to analyse Real-world images asmight appear in an advertisement become difficult to characterize unless one element at a time isvaried For statistical power a minimum of 10 repetitions within a stimulus category are requiredalthough 20ndash30 would be more likely to achieve meaningful resultsbull What type of software will be used to analyse the neuroimaging data Several software packagesexist and although these programmes make neuroimaging seem simple it takes a minimum of1 year of training to be able to use them and 3 years to become fully competentbull How will motion correction be performedbull Are conditions balanced in time If not how will subjectsrsquo drifting attention be compensated forbull Is this a whole-brain analysis or is a specific part of the brain being examined These necessitatedifferent thresholds of identifying activation The chance of an activation appearing somewhere inthe brain is high due to random noisebull Will regions of interest be defined a priori If so what is the justification for this Conclusionsbased on activation of a single region will have relatively little predictive power over conventional
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
behavioural methodsbull If multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) methods will be used will they be completely data-driven(principal component analysis or independent component analyses) or will they be based onclassifier training of subject responses (support vector machine relevance vector regression orGaussian process regression) How will the resulting activity maps be interpretedbull How robust are the results Ask for a lsquobootstraprsquo mdash for example testing on a lsquofreshrsquo subsampleof databull What type of scanner will be used Either 15 or 3 Tesla scanners can yield images of acceptablequality Open MRIs do not have the field homogeneity or the gradient technology necessary forfMRI What quality control checks are performed to make sure the scanner is operating optimallyand consistently from day to day What steps will be taken to minimize signal artefacts in areaswith poor signal
PersPectives290 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reservedmanipulations74ndash76 These studies havefound that different dimensions of trustsuch as reputation fairness and uncertaintycorrelate with activity in different brainregions Moreover the hormone oxytocinaffects human behaviour in various economicexchanges that depend on socialinteractions77 Finally a candidatersquos messagecontent could be viewed as an experientialproduct One could theoretically attemptto maximize striatal and OFC responsesto platform statements although for thereasons stated above this is not necessarilypredictive of successconclusions and future directionsneuromarketing has received considerableattention in both the scientific communityand the media Although few scientificneuro marketing studies have been conductedthe existing evidence suggests thatneuroimaging could be used advantageouslyin several domains of marketingFor a marketer neuroimaging could beattractive because it might be cheaperand faster than current marketing tools andbecause it could provide hidden informationabout products that would otherwisebe unobtainable We think it unlikely thatneuroimaging will be more cost-effectivethan traditional marketing tools and sothe first point is mostly hype Howevercontinuing developments in analyticaltools for neuroimaging data mdash for exampleMVPA mdash suggest that neuro imaging willsoon be able to reveal hidden informationabout consumer preferences Althoughthis information could boost post-designsales efforts we think that the real pay-offwill come during the design process usingfMrI data during design could affect awide range of products including foodentertainment buildings and politicalcandidatesThere are two sides to the use of suchinformation Product manufacturers coulduse neural information to coerce the publicinto consuming products that they neither
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
need nor want However we hope thatfuture uses of neuromarketing will helpcompanies to identify new and excitingproducts that people want and find usefulOne example is a new trend in lsquouser designrsquoin which companies allow consumers toparticipate through the internet in thedesign of new products and by doing socreate products that are more useful for thecompanies and for their customers Perhapsa next phase in user design is one that incorporatesnot only what consumers expressbut also what they thinkFinally we return to the opening questionhope or hype It is too early to tell butoptimists as we are we think that there ismuch that neuromarketing can contributeto the interface between people andbusinesses and in doing so foster a morehuman-compatible design of the productsaround us At the same time neuromarketingas an enterprise runs the risk ofquickly becoming yesterdayrsquos fad Seasonedmarketers still remember the hype aroundsubliminal advertising which quickly fadedand died despite the research interest thatsurrounded it (and research on subliminalpriming remains a large part of academicresearch in social psychology) How canwe make sure that neuromarketing will notsuffer a similar fate For one the academiccommunity should take this topic seriouslyand not leave it to the neuromarketers andthe op-ed page of the New York TimesWe should also ask deeper questions onhow marketing works mdash and not simplyexamine whether type X of advertisingworks better or worse than type Y If wetake neuromarketing as the examination ofthe neural activities that underlie the dailyactivities related to people products andmarketing this could become a useful andinteresting path for academic researchand at the same time provide useful inputsto marketersDan Ariely is at the Fuqua School of BusinessCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience Department ofEconomics and the Department of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences Duke University DurhamNorth Carolina 2770 USAGregory S Berns is at the Department of Psychiatryand Behavioural Sciences Economics DepartmentCenter for Neuropolicy Emory University AtlantaGeorgia 30322 USACorrespondence to GSBe-mail gbernsemoryedudoi101038nrn2795Published online 3 March 20101 Beckwith N E amp Lehmann D R The importanceof halo effects in multi-attribute attitude modelsJ Mark Res 12 265ndash275 (1975)2 Day G S The threats to marketing researchJ Mark Res 12 462ndash467 (1975)3 Griffin A amp Hauser J R The voice of the customerMark Sci 12 1ndash27 (1993)4 Green P E amp Srinivasan V Conjoint analysis inmarketing new developments with implications forresearch and practice J Mark 54 3ndash19 (1990)5 Lindstrom M Buyology Truth and Lies About Why
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
We Buy (Doubleday New York 2008)6 Hauser J R amp Shugan S M Intensity measuresof consumer preference Oper Res 28 278ndash320(1980)7 Buchanan B amp Henderson P W Assessing the biasof preference detection and identification measuresof discrimination ability in product design Mark Sci11 64ndash75 (1992)8 Kahneman D Wakker P P amp Sarin R Back toBentham Explorations of experienced utilityQ J Econ 112 375ndash405 (1997)9 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J amp Rangel AOrbitofrontal cortex encodes willingness to pay ineveryday economic transactions J Neurosci 279984ndash9988 (2007)10 Hare T A Camerer C F amp Rangel A Self-controlin decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFCvaluation system Science 324 646ndash648 (2009)11 OrsquoDoherty J P Deichmann R Critchley H D ampDolan R J Neural responses during anticipation ofa primary taste reward Neuron 33 815ndash826 (2002)12 Aharon I et al Beautiful faces have variable rewardvalue fMRI and behavioral evidence Neuron 32537ndash551 (2001)13 Zatorre R J Chen J L amp Penhume V B Whenthe brain plays music auditory-motor interactionsin music perception and production Nature RevNeurosci 8 547ndash558 (2007)14 Knutson B Adams C M Fong G W amp Hommer DAnticipation of increasing monetary reward selectivelyrecruits nucleus accumbens J Neurosci 21 RC159(2001)15 OrsquoDoherty J Kringelbach M L Rolls E T Hornak Jamp Andrews C Abstract reward and punishmentrepresentations in the human orbitofrontal cortexNature Neurosci 4 95ndash102 (2001)16 Izuma K Saito D N amp Sadato N Processing ofsocial and monetary rewards in the human striatumNeuron 58 284ndash294 (2008)17 Rilling J K et al A neural basis for socialcooperation Neuron 35 1ndash20 (2002)18 Ploghaus A Becerra L Borras C amp Borsook DNeural circuitry underlying pain modulationexpectation hypnosis placebo Trends Cogn Sci7 197ndash200 (2003)19 Ploghaus A et al Dissociating pain from itsanticipation in the human brain Science 2841979ndash1981 (1999)20 Koyama T McHaffie J G Laurienti P J ampCoghill R C The subjective experience of pain whereexpectations become reality Proc Natl Acad Sci USA102 12950ndash12955 (2005)21 Craig A D How do you feel Interoception the senseof the physiological condition of the body Nature RevNeurosci 3 655ndash666 (2002)22 Hare T A OrsquoDoherty J Camerer C F Schultz W ampRangel A Dissociating the role of the orbitofrontalcortex and the striatum in the computation of goalvalues and prediction errors J Neurosci 285623ndash5630 (2008)23 Plassmann H OrsquoDoherty J Shiv B amp Rangel AMarketing actions can modulate neuralrepresentations of experienced pleasantnessProc Natl Acad Sci USA 105 1050ndash1054 (2008)24 Poldrack R A Can cognitive processes be inferredfrom neuroimaging data Trends Cogn Sci 10 59ndash63(2006)25 Poldrack R A The role of fMRI in cognitiveneuroscience where do we stand Curr OpinNeurobiol 18 223ndash227 (2008)26 Delgado M R Reward-related responses in thehuman striatum Ann NY Acad Sci 1104 70ndash88(2007)27 Fox P T amp Lancaster J L Mapping context andcontent the BrainMap model Nature Rev Neurosci3 319ndash321 (2002)28 Knutson B Rick S Wimmer G E Prelec D ampLoewenstein G Neural predictors of purchasesNeuron 53 147ndash156 (2007)29 Grosenick L Greer S amp Knutson B Interpretableclassifiers for FMRI improve prediction of purchasesIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 539ndash548(2008)30 Rangel A Camerer C amp Montague P RA framework for studying the neurobiology ofvalue-based decision making Nature Rev Neurosci 9545ndash556 (2008)31 Camerer C Loewenstein G amp Prelec DNeuroeconomics how neuroscience can informeconomics J Econ Lit 43 9ndash64 (2005)32 Glimcher P W Decisions decisions decisionschoosing a biological science of choice Neuron 36
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
323ndash332 (2002)33 Yin H H Ostlund S B amp Balleine B W Rewardguidedlearning beyond dopamine in the nucleusaccumbens the integrative functions of cortico-basalganglia networks Eur J Neurosci 28 1437ndash1448(2008)34 Padoa-Schioppa C amp Assad J A Neurons in theorbitofrontal cortex encode economic value Nature441 223ndash226 (2006)35 Schoenbaum G amp Roesch M Orbitofrontal cortexassociative learning and expectancies Neuron 47633ndash636 (2005)
PersPectivesnATure reVIeWS | NeuroSCieNCe VOLuMe 11 | APrIL 2010 | 291copy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved36 Norman K A Polyn S M Detre G J ampHaxby J V Beyond mind-reading multi-voxelpattern analysis of fMRI data Trends Cogn Sci 10424ndash430 (2006)37 Haynes JD amp Rees G Decoding mental states fromactivity in humans Nature Rev Neurosci 7 523ndash534(2006)38 Kamitani Y amp Tong F Decoding the visual andsubjective contents of the human brain NatureNeurosci 8 679ndash685 (2005)39 Kay K N Naselaris T Prenger R J amp Gallant J LIdentifying natural images from human brain activityNature 452 352ndash356 (2008)40 Hasson U Nir Y Levy I Fuhrmann G ampMalach R Intersubject synchronization ofcortical activity during natural vision Science303 1634ndash1640 (2004)41 Mitchell T M et al Predicting human brain activityassociated with the meanings of nouns Science320 1191ndash1195 (2008)42 Speer N K Zacks J M amp Reynolds J RHuman brain activity time-locked to narrative evenboundaries Psychol Sci 18 449ndash455 (2007)43 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Spontaneous mentalizingduring an interactive real world task an fMRI studyNeuropsychologia 44 1674ndash1682 (2006)44 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Decoding human brainactivity during real-world experiences Trends CognSci 11 356ndash365 (2007)45 McClure S M et al Neural correlates of behavioralpreference for culturally familiar drinks Neuron 44379ndash387 (2004)46 Ambler T Ioannides A amp Rose S Brands on thebrain neuro-images of advertising Bus Strategy Rev11 17ndash30 (2000)47 Rossiter J R Silberstein R B Harris P G amp Nield GBrain-imaging detection of visual scene encoding inlong-term memory for TV commercials J Advert Res41 13ndash22 (2001)48 Astolfi L et al Neural basis for brain responses to TVcommercials a high-resolution EEG study IEEE TransNeural Syst Rehabil Eng 16 522ndash531 (2008)49 Tverksy A amp Kahneman D The framing of decisionsand the psychology of choice Science 211 453ndash458(1981)50 De Martino B Kumaran D Seymour B ampDolan R J Frames biases and rational decisionmakingin the human brain Science 313 684ndash687(2006)51 Waber R L Shiv B Carmon Z amp Ariely DCommercial features of placebo and therapeuticefficacy JAMA 299 1016ndash1017 (2008)52 Montague P R amp Berns G S Neural economicsand the biological substrates of valuation Neuron36 265ndash284 (2002)53 Schultz W Dayan P amp Montague P R A neuralsubstrate of prediction and reward Science 2751593ndash1599 (1997)54 Colloca L amp Benedetti F Placebos and painkillersis mind as real as matter Nature Rev Neurosci 6545ndash552 (2005)55 Wager T D et al Placebo-induced changes in fMRI inthe anticipation and experience of pain Science 3031162ndash1167 (2004)56 Benedetti F Mayberg H S Wager T D Stohler C Samp Zubieta J K Neurobiological mechanisms of theplacebo effect J Neurosci 25 10390ndash10402 (2005)57 Kenning P H amp Plassmann H How neuroscience caninform consumer research IEEE Trans Neural SystRehabil Eng 16 532ndash538 (2008)58 Lee N Broderick A J amp Chamberlain L What isneuromarketing A discussion and agenda for futureresearch Int J Psychophysiol 63 199ndash204(2007)59 Yoon C Gutchess A H Feinberg F amp Polk T A
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study ofneural dissociations between brand and personjudgments J Consum Res 33 31ndash40 (2006)60 Small D M amp Prescott J Odortaste integrationand the perception of flavor Exp Brain Res 166345ndash357 (2005)61 Rolls E T Brain mechanisms underlying flavour andappetite Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 3611123ndash1136 (2006)62 De Araujo I E T amp Rolls E T The representationin the human brain of food texture and oral fatJ Neurosci 24 3086ndash3093 (2004)63 Hasson U Furman O Clark D Dudai Y ampDavachi L Enhanced intersubject correlationsduring movie viewing correlate with successfulepisodic encoding Neuron 57 452ndash462 (2008)64 Eberhard J P Applying neuroscience to architectureNeuron 62 753ndash756 (2009)65 Spiers H J amp Maguire E A Neural substratesof driving behaviour NeuroImage 36 245ndash255(2007)66 Calhoun V D et al Different activation dynamics inmultiple neural systems during simulated drivingHum Brain Map 16 158ndash167 (2002)67 Freedman J This is your brain on politics New YorkTimes (18 Jan 2005)68 Westen D Blagov P S Harenski K Kilts C ampHamann S Neural bases of motivated reasoningan FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisanpolitical judgment in the 2004 US Presidentialelection J Cogn Neurosci 18 1947ndash1958 (2006)69 Kato J et al Neural correlates of attitude changefollowing positive and negative advertisementsFront Behav Neurosci 3 6 (2009)70 Tsao D Y amp Livingstone M S Mechanisms of faceperception Ann Rev Neurosci 31 411ndash437 (2008)71 Kanwisher N amp Yovel G The fusiform face areaa cortical region specialized for the perception offaces Philos Transact Roy Soc B Biol Sci 3612109ndash2128 (2006)72 Spezio M L et al A neural basis for the effect ofcandidate appearance on election outcomes SocCogn Affect Neurosci 3 344ndash352 (2008)73 Kaplan J T Freedman J amp Iacoboni M Us versusthem political attitudes and party affiliation influenceneural response to faces of presidential candidatesNeuropsychologia 45 55ndash64 (2007)74 Fehr E amp Camerer C Social neuroeconomicsthe neural circuitry of social preferences TrendsCogn Sci 11 419ndash427 (2007)75 Kosfeld M Heinrichs M Zak P J Fischbacher Uamp Fehr E Oxytocin increases trust in humansNature 435 673ndash676 (2005)76 King-Casas B et al Getting to know you reputationand trust in a two-person economic exchange Science308 78ndash83 (2005)77 Baumgartner T Heinrichs M Vonlanthen AFischbacher U amp Fehr E Oxytocin shapes theneural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation inhumans Neuron 58 639ndash650 (2008)78 Davidson R J Ekman P Saron C D Senulis J A ampFriesen W V Approach-withdrawal and cerebralasymmetry emotional expression and brain physiology IJ Pers Soc Psychol 58 330ndash341 (1990)79 Harmon-Jones E Clarifying the emotivefunctions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activityPsychophysiology 40 838ndash848 (2003)80 Huster R J Stevens S Gerlach A L amp Rist FA spectroanalytic approach to emotionalresponses evoked through picture presentationInt J Psychophysiol 72 212ndash216 (2008)81 Ohme R Reykowska D Wiener D amp Choromanska AAnalysis of neurophysiological reactions to advertisingstimuli by means of EEG and galvanic skin responsemeasures J Neurosci Psychol Econ 2 21ndash31(2009)82 Kobayashi M amp Pascual-Leone A Transcranialmagnetic stimulation in neurology Lancet Neurol2 145ndash156 (2003)83 Illes J et al Incidental findings in brain imagingresearch Science 311 783ndash784 (2006)84 Thirion B et al Analysis of a large fMRI cohortstatistical and methodological issues for groupanalyses NeuroImage 35 105ndash120 (2007)AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by grants to GSB from theNational Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA016434 andR01DA025045) the Office of Naval Research and Air ForceOffice of Scientific Research and the National ScienceFoundation (BCS0827313)Competing interests statementThe authors declare competing financial interests see web
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-
version for detailsFURtHeR inFoRMationDan Arieleyrsquos homepagehttpwwwpredictablyirrationalcomGregory s Bernsrsquos homepagehttpwwwneuropolicyemoryeduoverviewhtmlFederal election commission httpwwwfecgovsUPPLeMentaRy inFoRMationSee online article S1 (box)All liNkS Are ACTive iN The oNliNe PdF
PersPectives292 | APrIL 2010 | VOLuMe 11 wwwnaturecomreviewsneurocopy 20 Macmillan Publishers Limited 10 All rights reserved
- Food Works Too
- Branding Implications
- Reviews at Amazoncom
- This treatise is designed for patient methodical readers with a quest for insight Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers consciousness so he reviews existing research on advertising and includes cognitive sciences understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level His research is accessible since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points Du Plessis results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising Given the intangible nature of creativity a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection Of course the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable systematic approach such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media
- Directed Inhibition in Cortex Anatomical Tracing Indicates that ACC Can Inhibit DLPFC
-