Neuromarketing: What's it all about?

Have you ever wondered about the relationship between sex and cars? Intuitively, we all know there’s something going on there, but new research in the area of neuromarketing is beginning to shed light on the subject and it appears there’s a connection. Brain wave recording devices have been available for decades but new technology can now pinpoint more precisely which brain regions are active as people respond to products or make brand choices or are exposed to advertisements. The neuroscience dream of being able to peer into the functioning brain has been made possible. When Daimler Chrysler recently showed pictures of their cars while measuring brainwave activity with an fMRI scanner, they found that sports cars stimulated the reward centre of the brain, which is also the area stirred by drugs, alcohol and sex. The front view of the cars, with distinctive facade and headlight “eyes”, subjects showed brain activity in the facial recognition centre of the brain.

Our esteemed colleague Dr Max Sutherland recently (February 2007) addressed the inaugural Australian Neuromarketing Symposium at Swinburne University (Melbourne) on the subject “Neuromarketing: What's it all about?” That talk became his monthly feature on Adandmind.com and this article – you can subscribe to Max’s monthly article on marketing technology here, get the RSS feed here, and get a printable PDF of the whole article here.

Rita Carter uses a wonderful analogy that brain-scan machines are opening up the territory of the mind, rather as the first ocean-going ships once opened up the globe.1 However, she cautions that our exploration and the vision of the brain that we now have, is probably no more complete or accurate than a sixteenth century map of the world.

Beginnings

Neuromarketing is an applied extension of neuroscience. The application of brain-scan technology to marketing, especially the use of fMRI (see inset), gave rise to the term. what is fmri?

Ale Smidsts (Erasmus University) is said to have coined the term in 2002 and the first marketer to use fMRI is said to have been Gerry Zaltman at Harvard (around 1999).3

However, to me the notion of neuromarketing has been around for 30 years, even if the word hasn’t.

Peering Inside Heads

Neuromarketing is an extension of peering inside people’s heads with devices. In the late 1960’s we were playing with pupilometers – devices that measure spontaneous pupil dilation as an indicator of peoples’ interest while they were looking at packages or print advertisements. Herbert Krugman was a pioneer.4

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