Neuromarketing News

Monday’s Business Week features an article on the Top 8 Tech Trends for 2008. Neuromarketing ranks in at #2:

What You Really Want to Buy
by Stephen Baker
January 28, 2008

Forget focus groups. Companies that want feedback on a product are getting inside consumers’ heads—literally. The latest rage in marketing involves harnessing a test subject to a narrow shelf, securing the head tightly, and introducing the body into the tube of a $3 million functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (FMRI). For about $1,000 per hour, researchers flash images for their tightly trussed subjects, play advertisements, and read promotional literature. All the while, they study the second-by-second response of the brain….

Unlike information culled from traditional focus groups, the signals issuing from the brain can point to what the subjects are really thinking and feeling. Brain scans bypass the pride and shame and peer pressure that lead subjects in focus groups to edit their responses. In that sense, the scans are close cousins of lie detectors.

But like those tests, brain scans are open to different interpretations. Marketing insights hinge on the scientists’ reading of the jagged peaks of brain activity, the electrical outbursts in regions associated with fear, disgust, and desire. It’s a cinch to see activity in certain parts of the brain, says Roger Dooley, author of NeuroScienceMarketing.com, an industry blog. But it’s not always easy to predict behavior.

More about functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) on Wikipedia here.