My sister sent me a fascinating article by Graham Lawton and Clare Wilson, published in New Scientist called, “Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy.” –

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.300-mindreading-marketers-have-ways-of-making-you-buy.html

The article is about Neuromarketing – “a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.”   As a creative who has too often sat behind two-way mirrors and watched my campaigns die silent deaths at the hands of generally well intentioned, but generally inarticulate people haphazardly thrown together into focus groups, learning of a potentially better way to test the efficacy of advertising concepts before they get produced was of great interest to me.

In the article, Thom Noble, the managing director of NeuroFocus Europe claims that, “What people say and what they think [in traditional focus groups] is not always the same.  Conventional research really struggles with this.”  On an intuitive level, I have felt Mr. Nobel’s claim to be agonizingly true time and time again.  Later in the article, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, explains, ‘the problem is that much of the decision-making process happens at a subconscious level, and experiments reveal that people are generally not very good at explaining the thinking behind their choices. “Sometimes they simply don’t know why they chose things,” he says. “They concoct explanations after the fact, or make up explanations that are socially acceptable.”’  Thankfully, more scientific, technologically driven approaches to testing consumer preferences may be emerging.  It’s exciting to conceive of a day where these new neuromarketing research techniques, could enable marketers get around hearing what people think they think, or what people think we want to hear them say, and get directly into what they’re actually thinking.

Regardless of whether or not these neuromarketing techniques become refined enough to be useful and affordable enough to be widely available, there were two clear takeaways in the article that are both worth underscoring.

First, ‘… our decisions are much less rational than traditional economics suggests. “We find that emotions are really important,” says Mirja Hubert, a consumer researcher at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany.  “Even rational decisions are not possible without emotion.”  Emotions are also key to the elusive concept of “brand loyalty” – the often irrational preference for one version of a product over essentially identical competitors.’  If we want to make meaningful connections with our consumers and build lasting relationships over time, it’s more important to make them feel something than it is to ask them to analyze, calculate, and come to a rational conclusion.

And second, ‘According to NeuroFocus’s chief science adviser, neuroscientist Robert T. Knight at the University of California, Berkeley, an EEG trace [one of several technologies discussed in the article] can reveal the three things that market researchers really need to know: “Did you pay attention? Did it elicit emotions? Was it memorable?” If a product doesn’t tick these three boxes then it won’t succeed.’  True that, Robert T. Knight.  Those are the three boxes I try to tick on everything I write.

Recently in our town, two well known and well respected non-profit organizations that for years have worked well together are now having a bit of a spat. And rather than talk face to face in a quiet space, they’ve chosen to fight it in public. One volley requires a return. The return volley sparks an avalanche of return fire. The media picks up on it and is turning it into a field day. And where cooler heads could have prevailed in finding an amicable solution out of the spotlight, now we see a media circus unfolding.
In an era where media is looking for juicy content that sometimes make classic Jerry Springer episodes look positively G-rated, PR counselors are justified in suggesting that quiet diplomacy may be the best course of action. Turning down the heat is often a smart and better alternative than fighting your fights in public. Unless you want to star in a cable reality show.

I’ve often had a hard time justifying to myself the fact that I spend so much of my time and energy creating advertising.  Does advertising in and of itself provide any social benefit to anyone, or is it just contributing to the clutter and overall deluge information infiltrating every party of our everyday lives?  A college buddy of mine  suggested I look up this article – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html – which I found very heartening.  As it turns out, advertising can contribute to the pleasure people experience consuming the goods we advertise:

“ [This] research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

‘Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.” ’

-Stephen Shankland quoting a research scientist involved in the research.

I like thinking that if I write a good ad, it could help people enjoy whatever I’m pushing more than they would if they hadn’t seen the ad.

- Article in Full-

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html

January 14, 2008 10:55 AM PST

Stephen Shankland

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This graph shows the activity in the brain’s pleasure center; there’s more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, “You get what you pay for.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science.

My affair with Four Square took me by surprise. I’d heard about him. Heck, my friends had all dated him, so he couldn’t be that bad. But did I really want to jump on the bandwagon and be another notch in his interface? Did I want my friends and future children to know every detail of what Four Square and I had done together? That we stayed out a little too late on a ‘school night’ last Tuesday. Or that I really don’t ever cook dinner at home. And what happens when Mom and Dad find out I’m dating Four Square and lecture me about using protection and protecting my assets. Geez…the list goes on.

A glass of wine later and my inhibitions at bay, I flirted my way into his path and told him my name. And oh, the places we went. Our romance was a whirl wind. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him. And there wasn’t a friend (or stranger for that matter) that I met that I couldn’t help showing my new boy toy off to. The more time I spent with him, the better the gifts. He even made me feel like a queen and everyone around me knew it.

So what happened? Why are we on a break? Because there’s something to be said for showing a little leg and keeping it at that. I want a little mystery in my life. It helps keep the romance alive. My life was just too much of an open book with him and I jumped in too quickly. That and he shared TMI about what he’d done with my friends.

So although I haven’t ruled out drunk dialing him late one night, I’m definitely still on the lookout for someone a little more my type.