A recent article in The Economist, and another in Newsweek, explore the early stages of ‘neuromarketing’ and ‘neuroeconomics,’ or the use of brain scanning equipment in pursuit of consumer cash and decision making. Since people can’t usually describe their actual motivations (or they describe them incorrectly), a few research centers and consulting firms are hard at work applying the discoveries of neuroscience to the hazy world of consumer preference and choice — from Coke to Pepsi to cars to political ads.
One such firm on the commercial side is BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group, who frame what they do as follows:
Our goal is to define the neural basis of behaviors that are of specific interest to strategic business decision making, as well as of generic interest to the field of neuroscience. We are not interested in telling companies what people think about their products, but rather how they think. Our focus is decidedly from the consumer perspective with the direct intent to influence the behavior of companies, rather than consumers.
Catchy but creepy.
So far, neuroscience as applied to consumer behavior has proven interesting, but not immediately actionable. According to the Economist article, some studies have merely reinforced the mythical quality of brand over actual preference:
Most people say they prefer the taste of Coke to Pepsi, but cannot say why. An unpublished study carried out last summer at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, found that most subjects preferred Pepsi in a blind tasting — fMRI scanning showed that drinking Pepsi lit up a region called the ventral putamen, which is one of the brain’s ‘reward centres’, far more brightly than Coke. But when told which drink was which, most subjects said they preferred Coke, which suggests that its stronger brand outweighs Pepsi’s more pleasant taste.
Key to the findings is the fact that humans don’t expend a lot of calculation energy in making many decisions, but undergo a constant series of almost automatic responses in assigning value to their possible choices. According to one scientist in the audio interview on the Newsweek site:
The amount of time that we’re really thinking hard and making difficult decisions is relatively rare. Often we’re on autopilot.
Since the human brain wasn’t completely redesigned at each stage of evolution, they say, we still carry with us a bunch of functions and processes from earlier stages — impulse, reflex, conditioned response, etc. In essence, we’re all working with a reptilian brain with a few significant upgrades, some of which (the advanced reasoning function, for example) are still fairly weak.
A nuanced understanding of consumer decision-making is absolutely essential in finding and grabbing an audience, but also securing grants, gifts, and government support (they are all provided by people too, after all). It may be a bit premature to set up the magnetic resonance imager in the lobby or museum foyer, but it will be fun to watch others with far more cash learn from their attempts.
NOTE: I’ve just started reading Steven Johnson’s new book on brain science, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. We’ll see if it gets me anywhere.
