Chapter 4

Why Neuromarketing Matters

In This Chapter

Understanding the contribution neuromarketing can make to marketing

Considering the risks inherent in neuromarketing and how to mitigate them

Exploring the potential benefits of neuromarketing

Seeing neuromarketing in a broader context

Neuromarketing hasn’t appeared on the marketing scene without attracting its share of controversy. If you scan popular press accounts of the field, there are quite a few critics out there. Throughout this book, we address many of these criticisms. In this chapter, we provide a high-level overview of some of the major themes of contention and present our own views on the extent to which these possible dangers need to be taken seriously.

What you won’t find in the popular press are many discussions of the potential benefits that neuromarketing can bring to marketing and market research. Perhaps this topic is inherently less catchy, but we think it’s equally important. We summarize three types of benefits in this chapter.

Just so our own perspective is clear, we believe that, overall, neuromarketing is a positive addition to the methodological toolkit available to market researchers. It brings a more realistic view of the human mind into consumer research and addresses many of the shortcomings of traditional research, as we outline in Chapter 2. We believe that neuromarketing can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing, reduce the number of product and campaign failures, and ultimately make marketing more responsive to the real needs and wants of consumers.

We acknowledge that neuromarketing can be abused by marketers if they want to encourage the purchase of products and services that are unhealthy or unsafe, or to exploit vulnerable consumer groups such as children and low-income groups. Such practices aren’t created or encouraged by neuromarketing, but they can be aided by neuromarketing, just as they can be aided by any other form of market research.

Potential Dangers of Neuromarketing

As far back as 1957, when Vance Packard published his best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, critics expressed concerns that marketers were using psychological and subliminal tactics that were a threat to the public. Their warnings were based on the assumption that marketers were unscrupulous manipulators who would use any means at their disposal to get consumers to buy the brands and products under their care.

This view of marketers is more than a bit unfair. Yes, marketers want to encourage consumers to buy their products, but the marketplace itself is an unforgiving competitive arena in which brands and products that don’t deliver real value are quickly displaced by competitors that do. Success and failure are highly visible and marketers can rapidly learn from each other which strategies and executions are working and which aren’t. This creates a generally level playing field in which manipulating the consumer or making false claims is much more likely to backfire than lead to success, no matter what persuasive tactics are employed.

Sometimes the newness of neuromarketing has been overplayed by critics. Practices that are attributed to the influence of neuromarketing often have long histories of discovery and dissemination that started well before neuromarketing arrived on the scene. In many cases, neuromarketing can now confirm why some of these practices work (or don’t work), but the practices themselves can’t be attributed to neuromarketing. For example:

Marketers used food stylists long before neuromarketing confirmed that attractive images of food can attract attention, activate goals, and increase the chances of a purchase.

Marketers segmented the market of chocolate eaters into cravers and non-cravers long before neuromarketing confirmed that these segments do show quite different brain activation patterns.

Marketers have long known that many decisions are made by the nonconscious mind and that exposure to messages can have an impact even if consumers can’t recall the exposure.

Marketers have used celebrities to endorse brands prior to neuromarketing, confirming that such an endorsement can positively impact the consumer’s decision to buy.

Sometimes discomfort with marketing in general is transferred to neuromarketing. Many critics just don’t like the idea of marketing. They don’t like being bombarded with ads everywhere they turn. They don’t like it when all their clothes shout out their brand affiliations. They don’t like the fact that their beloved baseball park is now called Spaghetti Express Stadium. These are legitimate concerns. But these excesses of marketing can’t be attributed to neuromarketing. Nor would they be less of a problem if neuromarketing didn’t exist.

In fact, we believe that neuromarketing has the potential to finally show marketers just how damaging these overreaches can be to their brands and their corporate reputations. In Chapter 7, we discuss how consumers have developed both conscious and nonconscious defenses against persuasive messaging. By helping marketers understand where they’re throwing away money and alienating consumers in their efforts to rise above the clutter of competing products and claims, we believe neuromarketing can benefit both marketers and consumers, helping the former spend their marketing dollars more wisely, and helping the latter live in a world with a little less marketing noise and irrelevant marketing clutter.

Let’s take a closer look at the three main complaints that are leveled against neuromarketing.

Reading our minds, invading our privacy

A big concern of some commentators is that neuromarketing is a kind of mind-reading technology that can probe into our private thoughts and expose them to marketers.

This concern vastly overestimates the power of neuromarketing and misrepresents the sciences that underlie it. We cover this topic in detail throughout this book, but for now we want to emphasize that measuring brain waves and body signals with various kinds of sensors is not the same as reading thoughts. What neuromarketing technologies can say with some precision is that, at a moment in time, a person is exhibiting certain physical states that tend to be associated with certain mental states (like being attentive, or experiencing approach motivation, or feeling confused), but these mental states are not in themselves thoughts.

For example, your brain waves have a distinctive shape when you’re paying attention to something, but those brain waves don’t identify with certainty what you’re paying attention to. You may be paying attention to what a salesperson is saying to you, or you may be paying attention to the clock because you want the salesperson to shut up so you can get to your next meeting, or you may be rehearsing what you’re going to say in that next meeting. Your brain waves can’t tell the difference; they only reveal that you’re paying attention to something.

As we explain in later chapters, our brains have complex internal lives above and beyond their “day job” of orienting us and keeping us safe in the world. There is no scientifically reputable scenario in which that internal life is going to be opened up to external scrutiny in the foreseeable future. This is not a problem that consumers or public advocacy groups need to worry about.

Privacy, on the other hand, is an important concern. Standards around privacy are fundamentally important to the integrity and long-term viability of neuromarketing for one critical group: participants in neuromarketing research studies.

In the United States, any scientist who engages in federally funded research with human subjects must comply with privacy protection requirements as defined by the human subjects guidelines of the Department of Health and Human Services. These guidelines require the oversight of every study by an institutional (or independent) review board (IRB) composed of healthcare professionals, subject matter experts, and community leaders. The IRB provides written approval of all study designs, consent forms, procedures for protecting vulnerable populations (such as children, medical patients, and pregnant women), and participant privacy.

Federally mandated privacy policies require that participants’ confidential data be stored securely and that their results from a study be identified by an anonymous ID that can only be matched back to their confidential identity data using a third, equally secure, matching database. Some IRB policies also state that data can’t be reported on an individual-by-individual basis, even if it’s masked; instead, it can only be reported as group averages.

If a neuromarketing firm employs a staff member who also holds a university teaching position, that firm probably operates under an IRB agreement, because faculty members are usually required to have IRB approval for all human subjects research they perform, even if it's conducted for a private company. However, a private neuromarketing firm may not be subject to these privacy regulations, if it's unconnected to federally funded staff or research. Therefore, it's always best to ask a potential neuromarketing partner about its participant privacy protection policies. You'll find that reputable companies either operate under IRB approval, or subscribe to the privacy policy guidelines of a research industry organization like ESOMAR (www.esomar.org) or the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association (www.nmsba.com).

Pushing our “buy buttons”

This concern follows closely from the first one. If neuromarketers can read our minds, they can discover ways to manipulate us into buying things that we wouldn’t buy otherwise. In other words, if they can find the “buy buttons” hidden in our brains, they can push them.

The popular press loves the “buy button” metaphor and regularly suggests that neuroscientists are on the verge of identifying this magical source of consumer control that will allow marketers to turn consumers into mindless buying machines (we prefer the term zombie consumers) at the marketer’s command.

There is only one flaw in this deliciously terrifying scenario: Brains don’t work that way. There is no “buy button” in the brain. Purchase decisions are complex behaviors that play out over time, engage both conscious and nonconscious processes, force trade-offs between anticipation of reward and the pain of paying for it and, most important, are subject to a multitude of influences that exist outside the buyer’s mind. Ferrari may try to press the “buy button” in your brain as often as it likes, but until you have $250,000 in your bank account, you’re not going to buy that new Testarossa.

We do believe that neuromarketing, properly deployed, can result in products and brands that are more appealing to consumers, increase the effectiveness of marketing, and result in higher sales, revenues, and profits. Currently this is a hypothesis rather than a proven fact, but it’s being tested around the world. We believe that a science-based understanding of neuromarketing principles can create opportunities for marketers to shape consumers’ decisions and actions more effectively. This will happen not because marketers have more control, but because they’ll be providing products that are more appealing.

As the novelist William Gibson has famously observed, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And so it is with neuromarketing. If this new field confers a competitive advantage to its early adopters, it will grow into a mainstream practice, and those advantages will even out across the marketplace. If it makes marketing more efficient and less wasteful, those savings will spread back into the economy in the form of lower prices, better products, or increased shareholder value. If it doesn’t confer competitive value, it’ll be displaced by other methodologies that perform better. Either way, these significant changes will occur without any “buy buttons” being pressed.

Making us want things that aren’t good for us

People doing things that aren’t good for them is a serious personal and public policy problem, sometimes with tragic consequences. But it’s a problem that was with us long before the birth of neuromarketing, and it’s a problem that will remain with us as long as we fight the perennial battle in our own minds between resisting and surrendering to temptation.

Critics who fear that neuromarketing will make temptation even harder to resist have a point. To the extent that products and marketing are fine-tuned to resonate with the more primitive, nonconscious parts of our brains, they will become harder to resist. Especially if people aren’t aware that they’re being influenced, their ability to resist will be severely compromised. This concern is legitimate.

However, critics are wrong when they view neuromarketing as a weapon that can be used only by marketers to erode consumers’ ability to control temptations. In fact, the brain science on which neuromarketing is built is not a weapon for one side or the other. As this science continues to improve our understanding of why people engage in self-destructive behavior, the knowledge it uncovers can be used to develop practical solutions to counter such behavior, not just exploit that behavior. The only question is who will choose to use it.

As we discuss in Chapter 12, personality traits and orientations may have a much larger impact on self-destructive behaviors of all kinds (overeating, addiction, compulsive behavior, excessive risk taking, and so on) than any sort of marketing message, no matter how finely tuned and targeted that message might be.

Neuromarketing does not literally make us buy things, or do things, whether those things are good for us or not. Marketing is certainly in the business of trying to make us buy things, and neuromarketing is certainly in the business of helping marketing, but ultimately human beings can’t be made to do anything they don’t at some level want to do. Ask any marketer — if it were that easy, everybody would be doing it.

Potential Benefits of Neuromarketing

We’ve looked at the glass half-empty; now let’s look at it half-full. Although it makes less sensational journalistic copy, some commentators and practitioners have begun to consider ways in which neuromarketing can provide public benefits — to consumers, to marketers, and to society at large. In this section, we explore three main benefits that have been proposed.

Using neuromarketing to inform and educate

Neuromarketing can be used by the public sector to develop more effective behavioral change programs and provide consumers with unprecedented insights into their own decision-making processes. It can be used by consumers to help them understand how they make decisions and how they’re influenced in making decisions, so they can have more control over purchase decisions that they make quickly without much conscious thought.

Behavioral economics, one of the academic disciplines that underlie neuromarketing, sheds light on how human beings make economic or commercial decisions. Behavioral economics gives us new and powerful tools for understanding and preventing economic crises, or dealing with their consequences if they can’t be prevented. Behavioral economics has also found a receptive audience among executives in the private and public sectors, who aim at improving the effectiveness of the decisions they need to make. The end result of adopting this more realistic model of decision making should be a positive one, because decision biases that we were previously unaware of are identified and corrected in personal and corporate financial decision making.

We believe a similar situation is occurring with respect to neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is based on brain science findings that allow us to understand how consumers really make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by internal mental processes and environmental cues around us. Marketers can use these insights to lift the effectiveness of their strategies and tactics, and consumers can use the very same insights to make better decisions.

We see a future where neuroscience principles are taught in schools, helping students to develop their willpower, improve their ability to change bad habits, increase their awareness of how biases and nonconscious impressions shape their decisions, and much more.

Marketing is, after all, a kind of teaching. In fact, in some ways, it’s a more powerful kind of teaching than what we’ve achieved in our classrooms. Most Americans can’t remember the capitals of the 50 states they memorized in grade school, but they can still hum the jingles they watched on TV as children. The same brain science principles that underlie neuromarketing can and should be applied to improving education and teaching techniques around the world.

Making consumers’ lives a little easier

Consumers are typically busy, and many of their purchases are not vitally important to them. They want to save money, time, and energy. They also want to get a good return on their investment when they buy. Neuromarketing allows marketers to address these goals more effectively.

Brands provide a fast-track shortcut through the overwhelming maze of products and offers in many categories. Instead of comparing dozens of product alternatives, consumers limit their decision making to a handful of well-known brands. Neuromarketing helps marketers understand how this process works and how they can make it easier for consumers to use brands as decision-making shortcuts.

A brain science subfield called neurodesign focuses on identifying design elements of physical objects that our brains naturally find aesthetically pleasing (see Chapter 10). This work is being leveraged by neuromarketers to help product designers develop products and packages that are fun to look at, are easy to use, and add a small token of aesthetic pleasure to our daily lives.

Marketing is often cast in a negative light, but it’s important to remember that marketers live or die by delivering products that humans enjoy more and return to buy again. Sound marketing also attempts to understand how different people, with different wants and needs, can be satisfied by different products. This focus on more targeted consumer segments increases variety in the marketplace, provides unprecedented choices, and enhances value. To the extent that neuromarketing can help uncover these differing consumer wants and needs, which people are often not able to articulate well on their own, it can help product companies bring to market new products that have a better chance of succeeding.

Acknowledging the value of intangible value

Rory Sutherland, an executive at the advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy, gave an influential talk in 2009 in which he argued that advertisers (and by extension, marketers) should not apologize for what they do but should celebrate the fact that they provide a rather remarkable service to society — they increase the pleasure and enjoyment we get from consuming things by increasing the intangible value, rather than the tangible value, of the things around us.

Sutherland’s point, humorously made, is an important one. Neuroscience and behavioral economics have taught us that all value, as represented in the human brain, is relative. It isn’t inherent in any external “thing” but is perceived — subjective and constructed inside our minds — always in relation to some other subjective perception. Sutherland asks the heretical question: What’s so bad about improving our enjoyment by improving our perceptions, rather than spending money to improve material goods directly?

Some commentators have called intangible value the placebo effect of marketing. Like a placebo drug, it doesn’t really do anything, but it makes us feel better anyway. Sutherland cites a well-known definition of poetry: “Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.” This can easily be a definition of marketing. Marketing is very much about helping people accept the value in new things and continue seeing the value in familiar things. Neuromarketing provides some unique new tools to help marketers address this challenge.

Brands are carriers of intangible value. They simplify choice and encapsulate the essence of a product’s promise to consumers. They can summarize a lifetime’s worth of experience with a variety of products under a single brand concept. Strong brands can add intangible value to a consumption experience by adding excitement, pleasure, a sense of well-being, security, or heightened self-worth, thereby delivering more value than an unbranded product can ever hope to achieve.

Is that such a bad thing?

Learning to Live with Neuromarketing: The New Realities

Not surprisingly, we believe neuromarketing is here to stay — otherwise, we wouldn’t be writing this book! The main reason neuromarketing will endure, we believe, is because it isn’t just another clever concept developed by some consultant or academic. It’s a natural extension of a solid and established foundation of scientific discovery. Neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics are all respected and vibrant scientific disciplines that will continue to direct a stream of insights and findings into neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing is here to stay

We don’t believe neuromarketing will usher in a disruptive, new marketing practice. Instead, we expect neuromarketing insights, concepts, and methodologies to be integrated into marketers’ existing toolkits to improve their current practices by giving them new perspectives based on a more realistic understanding of how consumers’ minds actually work.

Neuromarketing allows marketers to view many of their most enduring challenges from a new perspective. It offers a new explanatory framework that puts many old problems in a new light. To mention just a few examples, neuromarketing helps marketers understand

Why consumers reject new product ideas when evaluating them in focus groups and interviews, yet end up enthusiastically embracing the new product when it’s launched

Why consumers enthusiastically embrace new product ideas in focus groups and interviews, yet fail to buy the new product when it’s launched

Why some highly engaging, high-profile branding initiatives and advertising campaigns fail to move sales, while others have a tremendous impact

Why consumers don’t need to recall an ad in order for that ad to have an impact on their brand perceptions and purchase decisions

Consumers aren’t helpless

Much of the fear expressed by critics of neuromarketing seems to be based on an implicit assumption that consumers need to be protected from neuromarketing because they’re weak and passive and, therefore, easy dupes of wily and clever marketers.

This is an ironic assessment, because if these critics took the time to understand the brain sciences that underlie neuromarketing (say, by reading this book!), they would realize that consumers are equipped with a highly evolved brain that makes them formidable players in the economic game of buyer versus seller. As we argue in Chapter 2, consumers are not rational consumers as predicted by classic economic and marketing theory, but they are intuitive consumers whose nonconscious and conscious minds work together to help them successfully navigate and make good decisions in an extremely complex and noisy world.

If neuromarketing has one key lesson for marketers, it’s to remind them that they’d better respect the intuitive powers of the consumers they want to influence. Consumers are, in fact, not easily fooled and will seek out what’s ultimately good for them, not what’s good for the marketer. As we show throughout this book (especially in Chapters 7 and 8), consumers in modern Western economies have developed some strong corrective responses and decision-making shortcuts that make persuasive messaging even harder to deliver, not easier.

Neuromarketing doesn’t provide a bundle of “cheap tricks” to help marketers take advantage of helpless consumers. It provides a more scientifically grounded way to understand the brains of both marketers and consumers.

Seeing your world through a marketer’s eyes

Just as it helps marketers to understand how consumers think, it also helps consumers to understand how marketers think.

Marketers basically want to understand everything about their consumers because they want to please them. Marketers really do want to satisfy consumers’ needs, not manipulate them. Any marketer will tell you that his life is made much easier when he can give consumers what they want, rather than try to convince consumers to buy something they really don’t have an interest in.

This isn’t to say that marketers won’t use every resource at their disposal to get consumers to buy their product over their competitors’ product — because they know their competitor is doing the same thing. As marketers begin to recognize and exploit the ways our brains identify and consume intangible value, it’ll become much harder for consumers to recognize the efforts that marketers are making to influence them in the marketplace.

One of the principles of neuromarketing is that nonconscious impacts on people’s judgments and choices lose their power to influence when people are made aware of them. By educating themselves — by reading books like this one — consumers can learn how their nonconscious minds work, as well as how their nonconscious judgments and decision processes may be influencing them as they go about their daily activities.

We believe that greater awareness of how marketers are using neuromarketing to understand and influence consumer choices and actions will help consumers to become better economic citizens, make more informed choices, and harvest more of the tangible and intangible value that is available to them in the vast global marketplace.