ADVERTISERS TURN TO SCIENCE TO GET INSIDE CONSUMERS' HEADS
Roby
Monday, February 26, 2007
When
researchers working under the auspices of the Radiological Society of
North America scanned the brains of subjects exposed to images of
brands, they discovered that strong brands excite parts of the brain
most associated with pleasure and reward.
The announcement of the findings in November prompted much excitement
in marketing circles and raised an intriguing question. Was brain
science about to change the face of marketing?
For many years, scientists investigating the workings of the human
brain had to content themselves with studying victims of brain damage
and disease, or conducted laboratory experiments in areas such as
attention, perception, memory and learning.
But recently, thanks to new technologies such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), which takes "pictures" of the brain at work
on various tasks, neuroscience has been advancing apace.
Marketers are intrigued by many of its findings. One is that brain
activity for an action seems to begin about half a second before a
person decides to take the action - suggesting that we are not so much
"making" the decision as simply becoming aware of the fact that a
decision has been made.
If people are not aware of their own decision-making processes, how
can marketers best influence them? Our brains routinely recognise
signals from our environment, including advertisements, that we have
no awareness of ever seeing. What does this tell us about how to
improve advertising effectiveness?
In 2002, Adam Koval, a senior executive at Atlanta-based Brighthouse
Neurostrategies - a consultancy specialising in applications of brain
research - attracted interest from marketers when he announced that,
thanks to the techniques of neuroscience, corporations would soon be
"getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave". In
reality, such dreams remain far from fruition.
Neuromarketing insights are influencing marketing practice at the
edges. Weapon 7, a UK marketing agency, is advising its clients on how
to place visual images in advertisements so that the message survives
the fast-forwarding process by registering in the brain
subconsciously.
PHD, a media buying arm of the US marketing services conglomerate
Omnicom, uses a process called "neuroplanning" to give different
weights to different media in marketing campaigns depending on what
the brand is trying to achieve and how each media affects the brain:
sight only, sound only, moving images plus sound, and so on.
But practical applications are hampered by the huge theoretical
obstacles that would-be neuromarketers still need to overcome.
So far, for example, the same research observations have spawned many
competing theories as to if, how and when advertising works on the
brain. Some suggest that advertising is most effective when it works
on consumers' emotions subconsciously. Others argue that consumers
only really learn about brands when their attention is fully engaged
and when areas of the brain relating to reason, emotion, and motor
activities are activated.
Debate rages even as to the meaning of experimental results. Is an
fMRI scan of a brain lighting up when presented with an image of a
brand proof of successful marketing or simply confirmation that brains
recognise what is familiar? Not to mention technicalities such as the
fact that the brain scanning equipment works 200 times slower than
real brains, warns Jane Raymond, professor of experimental consumer
psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
Piecing different research results together to create credible,
coherent theories is also a challenge. One important discovery is that
brains are modular, using distinct systems for different tasks such as
filtering out distractions, controlling the body, learning, motivation
and emotion. Urges coming from one module can be translated into many
different kinds of behaviour, or suppressed altogether. It is
precisely these complex links between marketing "stimulus" and
purchase "response" that would-be neuromarketers have so far failed to
identify.
In fact, most neuroscientific research has so far uncovered the
mechanisms behind long-established marketing and advertising
techniques. "There's nothing that comes through that says: 'Oh my God!
We have to change everything we do!'," says Gordon Pincott, global
development director of WPP-owned market research agency Millward
Brown.
Indeed, in uncovering the mechanisms of attention, perception, memory
and learning, neuroscience may also be revealing the limits of
marketers' ability to influence consumers.
Research by Prof Raymond's team suggests that consumers' attention is
"task-related" and that consumer reactions to things that interfere
with these tasks - including advertising - can generate "very
negative" reactions. Also, "if you throw too much information at
people, they shut down. Marketers need to take that on board."
"Humans evolved to make trade-offs in complex situations," says Paul
Zak, director of the Centre of Neuro-economics Studies at Claremont
Graduate University. "It's a fundamental misunderstanding that if you
look at someone's brain you can manipulate them. People really aren't
that easy to manipulate."
Antonio Rangel, a neuroeconomics expert at Caltech University, says:
"If you define neuromarketing as the use of neuro-technologies to
improve the effectiveness of advertisements or sales, I have not yet
seen a single instance of success."
With or without neuro-scientific breakthroughs, some things - such as
caveat emptor - never change. Buyer beware