Neuromarketing: A Pound For Your Thoughts

Shut up and take my money!

– FRY, Philip J. in Futurama. “The Attack of the Killing App”, season 6.

We are exposed to more than 2 million TV ads throughout our lives. The same as watching 3.3 hours of ads everyday, seven days a week, for 10 years. To come out with these ads, companies spend billions of euros on marketing every year. Before launching a new product, everything is carefully planned and studied, having in consideration the consumers' opinion (“because we care about you”). Paradoxically, the truth is that between 80 and 90% of all products fail in the course of their first year in the market, which means that there's a difference between what we consumers say and what we actually do.

Interrogating Brains

If there's something for sure in life, it is that companies don't like to waste their money. They want each euro they spend to generate an optimal result. Imagine their frustration, dealing with very little motivated customers through endless questionnaires, trying to figure out the mechanisms of the purchasing process... in vain. Because we don't do what we say. And if you don't know what I mean, give Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and her Spiral of Silence theory a try.

In the 50's, she developed a mass communication theory based on the importance of the dominant opinion. We humans, as social animals we are, are scared of isolation. When our opinion doesn't agree with the dominant opinion, we tend to not to speak up our minds because of our fear to be rejected by the others. It means that we all will die saying Internet Explorer sucks even if it's our default browser and we're absolutely in love with it (in a parallel world).

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's Spiral of Silence

The simple fact of making a question conditions the answer. “Do you think the new iPhone is thinner, lighter, faster, sexier and more hipster than ever?”; “Hell yeah!”. Indeed, all traditional marketing methods (questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, etc.) are mediated by language. By the time companies figured this out, the echoes of something called neuromarketing started to fill the meeting rooms of their headquarters.

This new trend combines traditional marketing methods with neuroscience to bypass the personal interpretation of the consumer. It literally asks his brain directly. Using electroencephalograms, MagneticResonance Imaging (MRI) and all short of sensors, neuromarketing digs into our brains, analyzing their electromagnetic response in front of audiovisual stimulus. There's no place for subjective interpretations, it has free way to our subconscious reaction to ads, multimedia contents, viedogames, product packaging, etc.

The big question is, is it possible to read somehow a certain region of the brain and predict something? Is it possible to induce this or that emotion on the consumer's brain so that it will make him want to buy a product? Can THEY control us?

Taking decisions at the level of a crocodile? 

In the last years, neuromarketing companies have been supporting their programs on a neuroscience theory form the 70's: the TriuneBrain Theory. According to it, human beings have three brains. The reptilian brain, which we share with reptiles, is the most ancient, it's related to the survival instinct and controls the muscles, the equilibrium and the non-voluntary functions such as breathing or heart beating. The second one, the paleomammalian brain or limbic system is in charge of memory and emotions. The newest one, the neomammalian brain or neocortex, is related to the ability of language, abstract thinking and perception.

When watching a TV ad, neocortex would analize the story, the story would awake an emotion in the limbic system and the reptilian brain would ultimately take a decision. In other words, some neuromarketing companies believe that we decide at the level of a crocodile. And according to them, the reptilian brain is pretty much predictable.

It is true that we're highly irrational and emotions have a main role in the decision-making process. However, current neuroscience considers this theory as obsolete since that's not likely the way our brain evolved and those are not its functions in that regions. Probably it's easier to get clients trying to make them think that the decision-making process is extremely simple and primitive rather than admitting that we are still far away from understanding human brain. Marketing tricking marketing. Ironic, isn't it?

Brain Nudism

Luckily for us, neuromarketing is still far away from decoding our thoughts. However, neuroscientists hazard it might be possible in the future. There's a relation between some regions of activity of the brain and certain thoughts. Without going any further, researchs of the CarnegieMellon University in Pittsburgh show that it is possible for a machine to discriminate concrete nouns that a person is thinking depending on the brain activity observed thought MRI.

What will happen when other people have access to these results? Electroencephalogram and magnetic resonance were born with medical purposes, but nothing stopped marketing from using it with an economical aim. In their defense, they say that what they do is just measuring reactions, but isn't it more like manipulation? Manipulation is something inherent to marketing. It's main objective has always been making us buy things we don't really want to buy. Then could it be used to control consumers? It would be hypocrite to say that it doesn't work. Neuroscience has proven to be useful in other fields and so it is for marketing as well.

The use of such techniques has serious ethical implications. Till what extent will it be possible to know what we think or control what we feel? It's something important to have in consideration. Meanwhile, a pound for your thoughts.

Estefanía Armero Cabezas