Neuro-marketing's limits and advertising creativity _ branding strategy insider

December 18, 2009
Neuro-Marketing's Limits and Advertising Creativity
As a cognitive anthropologist, who some 20 years ago traded backpack and quinine for Dramamine and a Hartmann three-suitor, Iconsult with marketers to assess the base beliefs and longings of various publics. My method is to talk to people as people, not consumers. In that way, I learn about how they transform the world into theirworld. The twists of paradox, compartmentalization and irony are always exquisitely on display. By-passing Langauage- Straight to the Brain Recently, a client asked me to work with a company that is using brain wave activity, or measures of blood flow in the brain, toassess central nervous system response to certain advertisements and products. The idea being to bypass consumers' languageand rational thought in the name of metrics, and its lookalike, objectivity. What I discovered was that no matter how good the scientists were at designing stimuli and reading fMRI results, the very bestthey could do for our client was to warn them what to eliminate from their ads. The advice garnered from peering under theconsumer's skull could only suggest what NOT to do. Unfortunately, the data from their procedure could not help us to determinewhat TO DO to enhance an advertisement's effectiveness. Fear and anxiety are what neuro-marketing technology is perfectly suited to measure, because it's hard-wired. For example, atthe pre-conscious and non-linguistic level, the sight of a man sitting at a table in his garage working at a laptop evoked the same"negative" response from people of varied demographic categorization. Through various experimental manipulations of this image,it was discovered that "garage" had negative connotations, similar to that of a "basement" image - a place where dark things canhappen. All such images were removed from subsequent public marketing pitches. The most primal of emotional states is an individual's response to a perceived threat. Flight or fight. Instinct clicks in. Adrenalineflows, muscles tense, the heart beats faster. Blood pressure rises. No thought is required. The body does it all for you in thename of self-preservation. Neuromarketing technology can help to minimize the negative. However, it cannot help to maximize the positive. That takescreativity and a holistic view of a person as a real human being. A localized purchase-button deep inside the brain does not exist. The traverse from brain to behavior is a art-like process thatblends data, emotion and belief that is then decantered into a person's personal brand of meaning.
Courtesy: Dr. Bob Deutsch, Brain-Sells TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b74a69e2012876650bcd970cListed below are links to weblogs that reference : Comments
Verify your Comment
Previewing your Comment
Posted by: | This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.
As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This preventsautomated programs from posting comments.
Having trouble reading this image?

Source: http://www.brain-sells.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Limits_of_NeuroMarketing.pdf