What Are Neuromarketers Really Selling: The prefix “neuro” is attached to an increasing number of other terms these days? There are people conducting research in neuroeconomics, neuroethics, and of course neuroscience,the broad research field that covers everything from the study of chemical receptors on individual nerve cells to the workings of the entire human brain en masse. The neuroneologism that has perhaps made the biggest impact outside
of the academic world, though, is Neuromarketing
Marketers and advertising agencies have always conducted research, and they have adopted methodology and concepts from academic psychology for decades. Traditional marketing research typically involves questionnaires, focus groups, or in-depth interviews, and it is usually aimed at answering questions related to product development,advertising, or evaluating potential new markets. This seems eminently reasonable; if you have a new product that you want to launch in a specific market, why not ask the people in that market what they think of it?
But in the 1990s, some people on the fringes of the marketing world got very excited about new technology.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging and other tools suddenly made it possible to visualize the workings of the human brain in unprecedented detail and precision. With an objective window into the working of the brain, marketers could neatly bypass many of the problems associated with asking subjects overt questions. A number of FMRI studies were conducted that explicitly investigated particular products and advertising, with often quite interesting and informative results. Unfortunately, FMRI scanners are bulky, very expensive, and not remotely portable. In
addition, the participant has to lie supine in a narrow tube,watching images on a screen while trying to ignore the God-awful banging and clanking noise the scanner makes. To really commercialize Neuromarketing, something much more portable, user-friendly, and above all cheaper was needed. It was recently found in a much older brainrecording technology: electroencephalography, or EEG