Neuromarketing: What's it all about?

One of the earliest studies using the newer technology was by Ambler and his colleagues at the London Business School.8 It asked people while they were in a MEG scanner (see inset) which of 3 brands they would purchase and found that familiar brands stimulate the right parietal cortex. The authors pointed to this area as the possible ‘location of brand equity’.

In 2000, Rossiter et al used SST to monitor brain waves while people watched TV ads and they were able to predict what scenes people would recognize a week later.9 They found they could predict this from activity in the left brain at the time of exposure (in the C3-F7 site of the posterior region of the frontal cortex). Until then it was thought that the crucial processing for pictures would be in the right hemisphere.

Interpretation

It is one thing to see which parts of the brain become active in response to a stimulus. It is another to interpret what this means or what you can do with it. This is tackled usually by correlation with dependent variables. Rossiter et al used verbal report in the form of a scene-recognition test one week later. Ambler et al focused on differences in brain response stimulated by brands that people said they would purchase (compared to ones that they would not).

Various studies have used:

* Verbal report (e.g. scene recognition, brand preference) * Behavior e.g. purchase vs non purchase (Ambler, Knutson) * Different segment reactions (e.g. Democrats vs Republican brains are said to react differently to political advertisements)

But mostly the focus has been on correlation with so called ‘known centers’ such as: reward centre, self referencing centre, face recognition centre, liking centre, anticipation centre etc.

As a result, neuromarketing studies have increasingly pointed to various ‘known centers’ in the brain. Yet knowledge about these so called ‘known centers’ is often sketchy and the claims about their function are often reasoned speculation rather than known fact.

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