Last week, my son got sick -- throwing up, 105-degree temperature, the whole kegger, poor kid.
My directions to my husband: Honey, go buy some Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, stat.
It wasn't rational. My son couldn't even keep down water. Moreover, I had my own homemade chicken broth right in the fridge. But, no, I had to have Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup for my sick kid.
And to some degree that's not an accident.
"We have very complex relationships with the brands in our lives, very strong emotional connections," says Carl Marci, the CEO of Innerscope Research, a leading neuromarketing consulting company in Boston.
But how? Stop clicking over to the West Elm furniture seduction website, and I'll tell you.
Inside the black box
Picking apart consumer choices -- analyzing why certain advertisements work or why some products sell -- is the oldest game in the book.A couple of decades ago, focus groups, surveys and advertising psychology were the buzzwords of the day, says Roger Dooley, who writes the blog Neuromarketing and is the vice president of digital marketing at Hobsons, an education company.
But the insights stopped with consumers' observable behavior and responses. "There was no way to know what went on in the black box of the brain," Dooley says.
Neuromarketing, which relies on technologies from the field of neuroscience, such as functional MRIs and PET scans and other biological measures, "gives us a look inside that black box," Dooley adds. "It doesn't change what's happening. The real promise of neuromarketing is to help advertisers and product developers get better feedback from customers, for better market research."
Neuromarketing doesn't change what happens to you when you look at a Porsche or the new G line of Gatorade drinks. But neuromarketers think that by gauging your unconscious emotional responses to ads, websites and products, they can alter those messages to increase your engagement and drive your purchasing choices.
But can they?
Does it make you sweat?
Neuromarketing does have some downsides: a) It's pricey and labor intensive, thus the study sizes tend to be small; and b) although all those biometrics measure something, the jury is just trickling in now as to what that is and what it means.At Innerscope, scientists hook subjects up to biometric belts that measure five responses: heart rate, perspiration, respiration, motion and eye movement.
Innerscope marketing researchers use biometric belts to study the 'black box' of the brain.
Maybe they do.
Martin Lindstrom, the author of "Buy-ology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy," spent five years and $7 million using neuromarketing techniques to test the responses of 2,000 people to everything from religious symbols to cigarette ads. (They have more in common than you'd think.)
Lindstrom found that when smokers looked at a billboard of a cowboy on a horse, with a certain red background, it would kick up the neurological response in the nucleus accumbens region of the brain, associated with pleasure and addiction. Guess why.
Paradoxically, health warnings on cigarette packages, Lindstrom found, also stimulated the nucleus accumbens, suggesting that those warnings actually increased the craving for a smoke instead of squelching it.
It seems that the brain doesn't respond to the overt message ("Don't smoke; it'll kill you") but to the unconscious association with smoking itself ("Mmmm. Feels good. Remember?").
In neither case did Lindstrom use a "conscious" method such as a survey or questionnaire. He simply measured what the brain was doing.
Continued: What your neurons tell marketers