Neuromarketing: What's it all about?

Bias towards overclaiming exists in the media as well as in the marketing of consulting services to clients. The media love sensationalist stories that can carry a headline like "'Buy centre of the brain found“. As a result, journalistic reporting is prone to outstrip the scientific substance.

Also, Joe and Jane Citizen along with the media, harbor very few doubts about the power of advertising and believe it knows what it is doing - otherwise why would it be using neuromarketing? As Ehrenberg once observed: “Advertising is in an odd position. Its extreme protagonists claim it has extraordinary powers…. and its severest critics believe them.”12 Mystique forms a convenient climate for smoke-and-mirrors merchants, to rush in and tout their consulting services brandishing these new devices.

For the substantive pioneers this is going to make things difficult because it inevitably degrades the whole field. Where the software industry has vaporware, the marketing-research industry has toutware. The difficulty for clients is in identifying genuine scientific neuromarketing in amongst a growing clutter of toutware services on offer.

A Plea.

At this point I made a plea for this first Australian conference on neuromarketing to avoid hyper-claim. We know that ‘hidden buy buttons’ are a media fantasy but some neuromarketing suppliers cannot resist the temptation to pander to the media’s need for a sensationalist headline. Myth and mystique will be difficult to dispel and will prompt regulation to constrain neuromarketing.

Hype is likely to lead to a social backlash because marketing already stands accused as a cause in social epidemics like obesity, diabetes, alcoholism and gambling. After the legacy of Big Tobacco, marketing is not cut much slack. In 2004 I wrote a column ‘Neuromarketing in Retreat’ about how clients were shying away from neuromarketing and how conferences on it were being cancelled. I said that neuromarketing was in retreat, away from the gaze of public opinion and into the closet - but not into oblivion.

Since then neuromarketing has re-emerged and conferences like this are evidence of it. So what does this mean? Has the threat disappeared?

No. To date, the regulatory environment in the USA, with a Republican president and a Republican controlled congress, has been relatively benign. Federal regulators, the FCC and FTC, have ‘looked the other way’ on a number of controversial activities including neuromarketing (and product placement13 ). However, under the scrutiny of a new Democrat controlled Congress you can expect that these regulatory bodies will soon be casting a different eye over neuromarketing. Expect a regulatory climate change in the USA that will examine more closely, what controls are necessary in the practice of neuromarketing. And when the USA sneezes the rest of the world catches cold.

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