Neuromarketing: The search for the brain's 'buy' button
By David Rowan
It is 7pm in the body-imaging unit at Ulm University Hospital, southern Germany, and with the day's last patients returning to their wards, Dr Henrik Walter finally has the clinic's vast MRI scanner to himself. The angiograms pinned to the observation-room wall, their snaking arteries a humbling portrait of human vulnerability, are an awesome tribute to the life-saving wonders of magnetic resonance imaging - a technology that has revolutionised the way doctors visualise conditions ranging from tumours to ruptured tendons. Tonight, thankfully, Dr Walter's mission has nothing to do with medical diagnosis. He wants simply to peer into your innermost desires.
As neuroscience paints an ever clearer picture of how our minds work, researchers such as Henrik Walter are coming to understand how we process feelings that affect our purchasing decisions. By mapping out which parts of the brain are active when we choose a favourite breakfast cereal, or lust after a sports car, they claim to have discovered "objective" ways to predict which designs or marketing pitches will appeal most to us. It is, they fully admit, a relatively new branch of neuroscience, but that has not stopped some of the world's largest corporations paying close attention. For if brain images can tell them which brands trigger the strongest subconscious responses, and which commercials or logos touch us most deeply, then why would they have any further need for unscientific focus groups?
This quest for marketing's holy grail is already persuading multinationals such as Unilever and Ford to pay scientists to scan volunteers' brains. Hollywood studios are testing brain responses to film trailers, and food manufacturers are using neuro-imaging to fine-tune multi-million-pound product launches. They call the technique "neuromarketing", and hope that it will open up the consumer's inner mind like never before. All that remains is to convince the public that neuromarketing is not simply a powerful new tool designed to manipulate us.
As a paid volunteer removes his shoes to lie down in Ulm's white-and-pink Siemens scanner, Dr Walter - a clinical psychiatrist by day - explains that tonight's research involves studying how the brain responds to expected financial rewards. When the young man, wearing a pair of specially adapted Sony virtual-reality goggles, sees various symbols come into view, he must press one of two buttons on a hand-made keypad to win 20 cents or a euro. At times, the computer program will trick him and pay him nothing at all, but that is all part of the test. For what Dr Walter, his researcher and the technician watching behind the glass want to see on their monitors is which parts of the brain light up when we face sudden disappointment - as well as an extended winning run.
Tonight's work is designed to stretch our understanding of a powerful neurotransmitter called dopamine, and may perhaps eventually benefit the schizophrenia patients Dr Walter treats in his day job. But if you ever plan to buy a Mercedes-Benz, a Jeep, a Chrysler or a Smart car, Dr Walter's brain-scanning studies may also affect you. The Ulm neuroimaging research is partly funded by DaimlerChrysler, which hopes that Dr Walter and his colleagues - by looking deep inside the human brain - will eventually reveal the secrets of designing and selling a more universally appealing car.
"At first they just wanted a better understanding of man-machine interaction," explains Dr Walter, a thoughtful 41-year-old whose short greying hair lends him an air of distinction. "They said, 'Well, we know how to improve cars, but we're limited by the way people interface with the cars'. So we put people into the MRI scanner with a driving simulator, to see what happens in the brain when you're both driver and passenger.
"Then their consumer department approached us and said they were considering various car interiors, and wanted us to test the reactions in people's brains to tell them which would go down best. We explained that we couldn't do that, as the stimuli were too similar, but we said we could test the cars' exterior designs. So we devised a way to measure which cars rated as the most attractive, according to the brain's reactions."
The lab recruited a dozen young men, who were asked to rate photographs of cars on a scale from one to five. "Then we looked into their brains," Dr Walter explains. "We had three types of cars: sports cars, small cars and family cars. When we compared what happened in the brain, we found several areas were more active when looking at sports cars. One of the most interesting was the nucleus accumbens - a very deep and small area linked to reward. Other researchers have found that it is activated if you take cocaine, or look at sexual stimuli, or get food you like such as chocolate. Yet we found the same effect for non-natural objects such as motor-cars. It was fascinating."
You might not think a brain scan would be necessary to determine that men generally rate Ferraris above Ladas. But Dr Walter is more interested in tracking the neurological circuits that underlie such preferences. He found that cars deemed attractive, for instance, trigger activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus, thought to specialise in our perception of human faces, and in the lateral occipital complex, normally active when we are analysing shapes. "People often say shape is a very important criterion for them in judging a car's attractiveness," Dr Walter reflects. "And maybe they feel comfortable when the design reminds them of a human face."
Yet what makes the experiment so potentially valuable to firms like DaimlerChrysler was the scanner's ability to confirm which cars the volunteers told him in interviews that they liked or disliked. Because the MRI results tallied with their spoken preferences, Dr Walter knew they were being honest. "Where things get interesting is when there are discrepancies between what people are telling you and what's actually happening in their brains," he explains. "They might say, 'Oh, I don't like that car' -but their brain could be telling you otherwise. The next question," he adds, "is what this means for selling cars."
++++
Magnetic resonance imaging was first used to scan a full human body in 1977. But it was not until the early 1990s that neuroscientists adapted standard MRI scanners to produce three-dimensional images of brain activity at any particular moment. Mental processes, they understood, trigger an increased flow of blood in the specific part of the brain that is involved. What this new technique, called "functional MRI" (or "fMRI"), let them do was pinpoint these tiny changes in blood flow as brightly coloured areas on computer screens.
As they have learned more about which regions of the brain correspond to specific emotions or instinctive thoughts, neuroscientists have been able to "read" these fMRI images to map out where, and possibly what, somebody might be thinking. If you identify strongly with a magazine, for instance, your brain may buzz with activity in a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex. If a corporate logo inspires anger, an fMRI scan might show activity in your amygdala. And whatever you might be telling market researchers that you think of their products, your brain images could be revealing a deeper "truth" that you yourself may not even have acknowledged. No wonder marketing consultancies are talking up fMRI as the key to unlocking the consumer's mind.
Neuromarketing was first put on the map by the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched in June 2002 to give corporations "unprecedented insight into their consumers' minds", BrightHouse promised nothing less than to "change the marketing world forever".
For the first time, the company claimed, neuromarketing could let companies "understand the drivers of their consumers' behaviour". "What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind," Adam Koval, chief operating officer, explained later that year to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. "We will enable our clients and partners to design advertising, marketing campaigns and eventually products that will more effectively engage and drive their target audience's behaviour." Marketers were promised concrete result "in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave".
Marketers, by their nature, tend towards hyperbole. Yet BrightHouse's message - promising an end to "advertising clutter", and the secret to "loyal, long-lasting consumer relationships” - has been greeted with the utmost seriousness among civil-liberties activists. Last December, Ralph Nader's campaign group, Commercial Alert, denounced the agency's research as "something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union for the purposes of behaviour control". It demanded that Emory University immediately ban "neuromarketing experiments on human subjects" as unethical - an accusation that the university and the company strongly dispute.
Such denials do not faze Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director. "This is about the corruption of medical research to induce disease and human suffering," Ruskin explains, as gifted as his opponents in the art of shaping a persuasive message. When asked how, exactly, this non-invasive scanning technology could cause "disease", he replies quick as a synaptic brain signal. "People are subjected to an epidemic of marketing-related illnesses - obesity, Type II diabetes, alcoholism - and millions of children will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco," he says. "So any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising could be devastating on public health."
Commercial Alert is demanding legal restrictions on this "Orwellian" research. "Because the dangers are huge," Gary Ruskin insists. "What happens if these firms take on political clients? The history of the twentieth century is the history of the catastrophic deployment of political propaganda that swallowed whole countries in a genocidal frenzy."
For all its visionary credentials, BrightHouse has been caught off-guard by Commercial Alert's campaign. So, in response to a blitz of damaging publicity, the agency has been busy tweaking its own marketing message. It has dropped the phrase "Thought Sciences" from its name - it is now "BrightHouse Neurostrategies" - and has toned down its website claims to stress that "our focus is decidedly from the consumer perspective". Still, BrightHouse admits to conducting neuromarketing research for one Fortune 500 company. It will not name the corporation, but the agency has existing "client relationships" with Coca Cola, Hitachi and Delta Air Lines among others.
Dr Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist employed by BrightHouse as "research scientist and marketing strategist", says she receives on average a call a day from pharmaceutical companies, consumer-product giants and other businesses looking to find magic answers from neuromarketing. Yet despite the evident profits to be made - and BrightHouse may charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project - Dr Meaux must often turn away potential clients. "Companies looking for the brain’s 'buy button' will likely be disappointed with neuroscience, as there is no magic brain area that can predict whether or not people will buy a product," she explains. "Neither neuroscience nor marketing can read someone’s thoughts or inject messages into a consumer’s mind."
Rather than predict what a consumer is thinking, she says, brain scans can help explain how they are thinking: how they develop relationships with brands; how brand loyalty can be identified through neuroimaging; and what brain patterns define a "positive" brand relationship.
For instance, a recent BrightHouse study - intended for submission to a neuroscience journal - examined how "preference" is encoded in the brain. Dr Meaux and her scientific director, Dr Clint Kilts, asked 13 volunteers to begin by rating how much they liked or disliked various items ranging from commercial brands (Coca Cola bottles) and celebrities (Madonna) to generic vegetables (broccoli). The volunteers were then placed inside Emory's MRI scanner and, as they studied images of each item, their brain activity was recorded.
The results sent a flurry of excitement through the nascent world of neuromarketing. When the subjects were looking at objects that they "really loved", Drs Meaux and Kilts noticed intense activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex. This area had been shown in previous experiments to correspond with thoughts about a person's sense of self. In a marketplace obsessed with self-image, could BrightHouse have found a way to identify when a dress or a mobile phone makes a consumer feel: "Now, this really is me"?
++++
There is nothing new in corporations co-opting scientific research to sell us cigarettes or soap powder. Almost 50 years ago, Vance Packard's best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders exposed a world of "psychology professors turned merchandisers [who] are subtly charting your inner thoughts, fears and dreams so that they can influence your daily living". Packard's concern was the new "motivational research" industry, which used "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" to channel our thought processes. "Typically," he warned, "these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’. The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated."
Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from focus groups to galvanic skin response meters to try to discover how we really feel about their products. Dewar's Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink; an agency working for the National Lottery operator, Camelot, tested one of its Billy Connolly commercials on a panel wearing headsets that captured their brains' electrical signals. (Camelot says it used the agency "purely to run focus groups".) Now even Hollywood studios are looking inside our heads: a Los Angeles marketing firm is working with Steven Quartz, who runs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the California Institute of Technology, to scan film-goers' brains as they sample movies. "Participants will watch trailers while in a scanner, and we'll provide a report that covers both global and scene-by-scene reactions to the trailer, as well as casting responses," Dr Quartz explains. His service, launching this spring, will also be available to magazines and television channels.
The unanswered question is how much useful information marketers will actually learn. "Suddenly everyone's very keen to do fMRI studies, because they know they can produce impressive pictures of the brain with yellow and orange blobs in all the right places," Henrik Walter says, not entirely convinced by some of the current hype. Tim Ambler, a senior fellow at London Business School who has studied the brain's responses to brands, worries that bogus claims are being made for neuromarketing before the technology is sufficiently precise. "I'm reminded of the quacks who emerged when x-rays were invented and said they could make you better," he says. "Instead they killed a lot of people. In 30 years we'll definitely be able to pre-test advertising using neuroscience, and it will replace focus groups. But I don't buy today's claims, unless we can independently evaluate them."
Michael Brammer, an fMRI specialist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, agrees that the corporate world is becoming "over-enamoured" of the technology's current capabilities. "You're actually only measuring tiny changes in a very noisy [brain] signal," cautions Dr Brammer, one of Britain's most experienced practitioners. Still, that has not stopped him setting up his own commercial neuromarketing agency to capitalise on the growing demand.
His Oxford-based company, Neurosense, offers neuroimaging and psychological tests to help companies plan "product launches, sales promotions, packaging design, point-of-sale displays and advertising strategies". Although Dr Brammer will not disclose too many details, The Times has established that his biggest fMRI client is Unilever, whose brands include Domestos, Sunsilk and Birdseye. As with most companies we contacted, Unilever declined to discuss its brain-imaging studies.
But Dr Brammer, 55, who brims with passion for his research, is happy to explain what commercial clients are looking for. "They are asking questions such as, 'Should we go with this product or this product?'" he says. "Mounting a large advertising campaign or developing a new product is an extremely expensive business. Neuroimaging offers an extra dimension, providing additional, and probably more numerically accurate information about brain responses, than were available before."
Neurosense conducts its research using a clinical MRI scanner at the Institute of Psychiatry, in south London, with the permission of the ethical committee. Michael Brammer has thought a great deal about the ethical implications of neuro-imaging, and he is well aware that the technology could be used for socially questionable purposes. "I suspect that somewhere on this planet, someone's thinking, 'Should we give our senior executives a brain scan to see how suitable they are?' And I'm sure there are people in politics in this country who'd be overjoyed by an objective measure of their popularity."
Dr Brammer would, for his own part, refuse to help corporations "peddling harmful substances". "When people are engaged in research that has the capability of being used for malign ends, they need to take an ethical stance," he reflects. "I would have reservations if I could seriously see that what I was doing was being translated into an attempt to control and manipulate, rather than simply learn more about brain function. It's a fine line."
Concern is growing among academics about the use to which neuro-imaging discoveries may be put. Steven Rose, the Open University neurobiologist whose next book is called The Future of the Brain, has deep reservations about the unregulated use of fMRI. "Much of what these neuromarketing firms are selling is snake oil, but I have real ethical concerns about where brain control and brain manipulation are going," he says. "It's not that these techniques will necessarily work, but if people think they work, we'll become an ever more monitored society."
He cites research by the US military aimed at monitoring fighter pilots' brain patterns to predict when they are likely to lose concentration. "We are also hearing claims that you could use brain imaging in advance of someone committing a crime, because some criminals have shown a particular brain response. Does that mean we'd scan the population to determine who is likely to be a psychopath? I can see potential intrusions on personal freedom, and it's time we had an informed public debate."
++++
In the meantime, the world's corporations are clamouring to learn how scanning volunteers' brains might boost the bottom line. After running a series of fMRI experiments last summer at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, Dr Read Montague, a neuroscience professor, received an inquiry from PepsiCo Inc. The company's concern to learn more about his academic research was not, perhaps, surprising: after all, Dr Montague, who runs Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Lab, had reenacted the "Pepsi Challenge" with the help of MRI brain scans.
The original challenge, made famous through 1970s TV commercials, pitted Pepsi against Coke in blind taste tests. Although Coke was ahead in sales, more people seemed to prefer the taste of Pepsi. By feeding his subjects squirts of Coke and Pepsi while they lay inside the scanner, Dr Montague hoped to understand why. Sure enough, when his subjects were told that they were drinking Coke, the fMRI scans showed more activity in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, a region where we process feelings related to reward. This happened even if they only thought they were drinking Coke, but were actually tasting Pepsi.
"There is something about the way Coke is pitched to us that references something very familiar, warm and fuzzy inside us," Dr Montague concludes. "It may have nothing to do with Coke's rationally thought-out branding strategy, but somehow the memory and brand image of Coke insinuates itself in the nervous system in a way that affects our behaviour. And Pepsi's does not. It could be as simple as the hard consonants in the word 'Coke', or it could be something about always using red. Whatever it is, we could see the effect."
Such findings, Dr Montague believes, will only encourage corporate marketing departments to delve deep within the human subconscious. As a scientist, this causes him some concern. "I'm a true believer that companies can really be evil," he says. "Just look at the tobacco companies. We're not safe just leaving this technology in the corporations' hands - they could put people into the scanners in search of all the signatures that correspond to behavioural biases."
The technology, meanwhile, continues to attract new corporate admirers. As MRI scanners become cheaper, smaller and more portable, Dr Montague can see neuromarketing specialists moving into most large corporate marketing departments. "Because that's neuroscience's goal, right? To decompose us into a set of computations that we can quantify. And if companies can turn feelings into numbers, and understand how the biological parts of our brains give rise to them, then think what they'll do with that knowledge." He pauses. "I can see why some people don't like that idea."
(Written for The Times Magazine, February 5 2004)
It is 7pm in the body-imaging unit at Ulm University Hospital, southern Germany, and with the day's last patients returning to their wards, Dr Henrik Walter finally has the clinic's vast MRI scanner to himself. The angiograms pinned to the observation-room wall, their snaking arteries a humbling portrait of human vulnerability, are an awesome tribute to the life-saving wonders of magnetic resonance imaging - a technology that has revolutionised the way doctors visualise conditions ranging from tumours to ruptured tendons. Tonight, thankfully, Dr Walter's mission has nothing to do with medical diagnosis. He wants simply to peer into your innermost desires.
As neuroscience paints an ever clearer picture of how our minds work, researchers such as Henrik Walter are coming to understand how we process feelings that affect our purchasing decisions. By mapping out which parts of the brain are active when we choose a favourite breakfast cereal, or lust after a sports car, they claim to have discovered "objective" ways to predict which designs or marketing pitches will appeal most to us. It is, they fully admit, a relatively new branch of neuroscience, but that has not stopped some of the world's largest corporations paying close attention. For if brain images can tell them which brands trigger the strongest subconscious responses, and which commercials or logos touch us most deeply, then why would they have any further need for unscientific focus groups?
This quest for marketing's holy grail is already persuading multinationals such as Unilever and Ford to pay scientists to scan volunteers' brains. Hollywood studios are testing brain responses to film trailers, and food manufacturers are using neuro-imaging to fine-tune multi-million-pound product launches. They call the technique "neuromarketing", and hope that it will open up the consumer's inner mind like never before. All that remains is to convince the public that neuromarketing is not simply a powerful new tool designed to manipulate us.
As a paid volunteer removes his shoes to lie down in Ulm's white-and-pink Siemens scanner, Dr Walter - a clinical psychiatrist by day - explains that tonight's research involves studying how the brain responds to expected financial rewards. When the young man, wearing a pair of specially adapted Sony virtual-reality goggles, sees various symbols come into view, he must press one of two buttons on a hand-made keypad to win 20 cents or a euro. At times, the computer program will trick him and pay him nothing at all, but that is all part of the test. For what Dr Walter, his researcher and the technician watching behind the glass want to see on their monitors is which parts of the brain light up when we face sudden disappointment - as well as an extended winning run.
Tonight's work is designed to stretch our understanding of a powerful neurotransmitter called dopamine, and may perhaps eventually benefit the schizophrenia patients Dr Walter treats in his day job. But if you ever plan to buy a Mercedes-Benz, a Jeep, a Chrysler or a Smart car, Dr Walter's brain-scanning studies may also affect you. The Ulm neuroimaging research is partly funded by DaimlerChrysler, which hopes that Dr Walter and his colleagues - by looking deep inside the human brain - will eventually reveal the secrets of designing and selling a more universally appealing car.
"At first they just wanted a better understanding of man-machine interaction," explains Dr Walter, a thoughtful 41-year-old whose short greying hair lends him an air of distinction. "They said, 'Well, we know how to improve cars, but we're limited by the way people interface with the cars'. So we put people into the MRI scanner with a driving simulator, to see what happens in the brain when you're both driver and passenger.
"Then their consumer department approached us and said they were considering various car interiors, and wanted us to test the reactions in people's brains to tell them which would go down best. We explained that we couldn't do that, as the stimuli were too similar, but we said we could test the cars' exterior designs. So we devised a way to measure which cars rated as the most attractive, according to the brain's reactions."
The lab recruited a dozen young men, who were asked to rate photographs of cars on a scale from one to five. "Then we looked into their brains," Dr Walter explains. "We had three types of cars: sports cars, small cars and family cars. When we compared what happened in the brain, we found several areas were more active when looking at sports cars. One of the most interesting was the nucleus accumbens - a very deep and small area linked to reward. Other researchers have found that it is activated if you take cocaine, or look at sexual stimuli, or get food you like such as chocolate. Yet we found the same effect for non-natural objects such as motor-cars. It was fascinating."
You might not think a brain scan would be necessary to determine that men generally rate Ferraris above Ladas. But Dr Walter is more interested in tracking the neurological circuits that underlie such preferences. He found that cars deemed attractive, for instance, trigger activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus, thought to specialise in our perception of human faces, and in the lateral occipital complex, normally active when we are analysing shapes. "People often say shape is a very important criterion for them in judging a car's attractiveness," Dr Walter reflects. "And maybe they feel comfortable when the design reminds them of a human face."
Yet what makes the experiment so potentially valuable to firms like DaimlerChrysler was the scanner's ability to confirm which cars the volunteers told him in interviews that they liked or disliked. Because the MRI results tallied with their spoken preferences, Dr Walter knew they were being honest. "Where things get interesting is when there are discrepancies between what people are telling you and what's actually happening in their brains," he explains. "They might say, 'Oh, I don't like that car' -but their brain could be telling you otherwise. The next question," he adds, "is what this means for selling cars."
++++
Magnetic resonance imaging was first used to scan a full human body in 1977. But it was not until the early 1990s that neuroscientists adapted standard MRI scanners to produce three-dimensional images of brain activity at any particular moment. Mental processes, they understood, trigger an increased flow of blood in the specific part of the brain that is involved. What this new technique, called "functional MRI" (or "fMRI"), let them do was pinpoint these tiny changes in blood flow as brightly coloured areas on computer screens.
As they have learned more about which regions of the brain correspond to specific emotions or instinctive thoughts, neuroscientists have been able to "read" these fMRI images to map out where, and possibly what, somebody might be thinking. If you identify strongly with a magazine, for instance, your brain may buzz with activity in a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex. If a corporate logo inspires anger, an fMRI scan might show activity in your amygdala. And whatever you might be telling market researchers that you think of their products, your brain images could be revealing a deeper "truth" that you yourself may not even have acknowledged. No wonder marketing consultancies are talking up fMRI as the key to unlocking the consumer's mind.
Neuromarketing was first put on the map by the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched in June 2002 to give corporations "unprecedented insight into their consumers' minds", BrightHouse promised nothing less than to "change the marketing world forever".
For the first time, the company claimed, neuromarketing could let companies "understand the drivers of their consumers' behaviour". "What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind," Adam Koval, chief operating officer, explained later that year to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. "We will enable our clients and partners to design advertising, marketing campaigns and eventually products that will more effectively engage and drive their target audience's behaviour." Marketers were promised concrete result "in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave".
Marketers, by their nature, tend towards hyperbole. Yet BrightHouse's message - promising an end to "advertising clutter", and the secret to "loyal, long-lasting consumer relationships” - has been greeted with the utmost seriousness among civil-liberties activists. Last December, Ralph Nader's campaign group, Commercial Alert, denounced the agency's research as "something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union for the purposes of behaviour control". It demanded that Emory University immediately ban "neuromarketing experiments on human subjects" as unethical - an accusation that the university and the company strongly dispute.
Such denials do not faze Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director. "This is about the corruption of medical research to induce disease and human suffering," Ruskin explains, as gifted as his opponents in the art of shaping a persuasive message. When asked how, exactly, this non-invasive scanning technology could cause "disease", he replies quick as a synaptic brain signal. "People are subjected to an epidemic of marketing-related illnesses - obesity, Type II diabetes, alcoholism - and millions of children will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco," he says. "So any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising could be devastating on public health."
Commercial Alert is demanding legal restrictions on this "Orwellian" research. "Because the dangers are huge," Gary Ruskin insists. "What happens if these firms take on political clients? The history of the twentieth century is the history of the catastrophic deployment of political propaganda that swallowed whole countries in a genocidal frenzy."
For all its visionary credentials, BrightHouse has been caught off-guard by Commercial Alert's campaign. So, in response to a blitz of damaging publicity, the agency has been busy tweaking its own marketing message. It has dropped the phrase "Thought Sciences" from its name - it is now "BrightHouse Neurostrategies" - and has toned down its website claims to stress that "our focus is decidedly from the consumer perspective". Still, BrightHouse admits to conducting neuromarketing research for one Fortune 500 company. It will not name the corporation, but the agency has existing "client relationships" with Coca Cola, Hitachi and Delta Air Lines among others.
Dr Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist employed by BrightHouse as "research scientist and marketing strategist", says she receives on average a call a day from pharmaceutical companies, consumer-product giants and other businesses looking to find magic answers from neuromarketing. Yet despite the evident profits to be made - and BrightHouse may charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project - Dr Meaux must often turn away potential clients. "Companies looking for the brain’s 'buy button' will likely be disappointed with neuroscience, as there is no magic brain area that can predict whether or not people will buy a product," she explains. "Neither neuroscience nor marketing can read someone’s thoughts or inject messages into a consumer’s mind."
Rather than predict what a consumer is thinking, she says, brain scans can help explain how they are thinking: how they develop relationships with brands; how brand loyalty can be identified through neuroimaging; and what brain patterns define a "positive" brand relationship.
For instance, a recent BrightHouse study - intended for submission to a neuroscience journal - examined how "preference" is encoded in the brain. Dr Meaux and her scientific director, Dr Clint Kilts, asked 13 volunteers to begin by rating how much they liked or disliked various items ranging from commercial brands (Coca Cola bottles) and celebrities (Madonna) to generic vegetables (broccoli). The volunteers were then placed inside Emory's MRI scanner and, as they studied images of each item, their brain activity was recorded.
The results sent a flurry of excitement through the nascent world of neuromarketing. When the subjects were looking at objects that they "really loved", Drs Meaux and Kilts noticed intense activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex. This area had been shown in previous experiments to correspond with thoughts about a person's sense of self. In a marketplace obsessed with self-image, could BrightHouse have found a way to identify when a dress or a mobile phone makes a consumer feel: "Now, this really is me"?
++++
There is nothing new in corporations co-opting scientific research to sell us cigarettes or soap powder. Almost 50 years ago, Vance Packard's best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders exposed a world of "psychology professors turned merchandisers [who] are subtly charting your inner thoughts, fears and dreams so that they can influence your daily living". Packard's concern was the new "motivational research" industry, which used "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" to channel our thought processes. "Typically," he warned, "these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’. The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated."
Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from focus groups to galvanic skin response meters to try to discover how we really feel about their products. Dewar's Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink; an agency working for the National Lottery operator, Camelot, tested one of its Billy Connolly commercials on a panel wearing headsets that captured their brains' electrical signals. (Camelot says it used the agency "purely to run focus groups".) Now even Hollywood studios are looking inside our heads: a Los Angeles marketing firm is working with Steven Quartz, who runs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the California Institute of Technology, to scan film-goers' brains as they sample movies. "Participants will watch trailers while in a scanner, and we'll provide a report that covers both global and scene-by-scene reactions to the trailer, as well as casting responses," Dr Quartz explains. His service, launching this spring, will also be available to magazines and television channels.
The unanswered question is how much useful information marketers will actually learn. "Suddenly everyone's very keen to do fMRI studies, because they know they can produce impressive pictures of the brain with yellow and orange blobs in all the right places," Henrik Walter says, not entirely convinced by some of the current hype. Tim Ambler, a senior fellow at London Business School who has studied the brain's responses to brands, worries that bogus claims are being made for neuromarketing before the technology is sufficiently precise. "I'm reminded of the quacks who emerged when x-rays were invented and said they could make you better," he says. "Instead they killed a lot of people. In 30 years we'll definitely be able to pre-test advertising using neuroscience, and it will replace focus groups. But I don't buy today's claims, unless we can independently evaluate them."
Michael Brammer, an fMRI specialist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, agrees that the corporate world is becoming "over-enamoured" of the technology's current capabilities. "You're actually only measuring tiny changes in a very noisy [brain] signal," cautions Dr Brammer, one of Britain's most experienced practitioners. Still, that has not stopped him setting up his own commercial neuromarketing agency to capitalise on the growing demand.
His Oxford-based company, Neurosense, offers neuroimaging and psychological tests to help companies plan "product launches, sales promotions, packaging design, point-of-sale displays and advertising strategies". Although Dr Brammer will not disclose too many details, The Times has established that his biggest fMRI client is Unilever, whose brands include Domestos, Sunsilk and Birdseye. As with most companies we contacted, Unilever declined to discuss its brain-imaging studies.
But Dr Brammer, 55, who brims with passion for his research, is happy to explain what commercial clients are looking for. "They are asking questions such as, 'Should we go with this product or this product?'" he says. "Mounting a large advertising campaign or developing a new product is an extremely expensive business. Neuroimaging offers an extra dimension, providing additional, and probably more numerically accurate information about brain responses, than were available before."
Neurosense conducts its research using a clinical MRI scanner at the Institute of Psychiatry, in south London, with the permission of the ethical committee. Michael Brammer has thought a great deal about the ethical implications of neuro-imaging, and he is well aware that the technology could be used for socially questionable purposes. "I suspect that somewhere on this planet, someone's thinking, 'Should we give our senior executives a brain scan to see how suitable they are?' And I'm sure there are people in politics in this country who'd be overjoyed by an objective measure of their popularity."
Dr Brammer would, for his own part, refuse to help corporations "peddling harmful substances". "When people are engaged in research that has the capability of being used for malign ends, they need to take an ethical stance," he reflects. "I would have reservations if I could seriously see that what I was doing was being translated into an attempt to control and manipulate, rather than simply learn more about brain function. It's a fine line."
Concern is growing among academics about the use to which neuro-imaging discoveries may be put. Steven Rose, the Open University neurobiologist whose next book is called The Future of the Brain, has deep reservations about the unregulated use of fMRI. "Much of what these neuromarketing firms are selling is snake oil, but I have real ethical concerns about where brain control and brain manipulation are going," he says. "It's not that these techniques will necessarily work, but if people think they work, we'll become an ever more monitored society."
He cites research by the US military aimed at monitoring fighter pilots' brain patterns to predict when they are likely to lose concentration. "We are also hearing claims that you could use brain imaging in advance of someone committing a crime, because some criminals have shown a particular brain response. Does that mean we'd scan the population to determine who is likely to be a psychopath? I can see potential intrusions on personal freedom, and it's time we had an informed public debate."
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In the meantime, the world's corporations are clamouring to learn how scanning volunteers' brains might boost the bottom line. After running a series of fMRI experiments last summer at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, Dr Read Montague, a neuroscience professor, received an inquiry from PepsiCo Inc. The company's concern to learn more about his academic research was not, perhaps, surprising: after all, Dr Montague, who runs Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Lab, had reenacted the "Pepsi Challenge" with the help of MRI brain scans.
The original challenge, made famous through 1970s TV commercials, pitted Pepsi against Coke in blind taste tests. Although Coke was ahead in sales, more people seemed to prefer the taste of Pepsi. By feeding his subjects squirts of Coke and Pepsi while they lay inside the scanner, Dr Montague hoped to understand why. Sure enough, when his subjects were told that they were drinking Coke, the fMRI scans showed more activity in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, a region where we process feelings related to reward. This happened even if they only thought they were drinking Coke, but were actually tasting Pepsi.
"There is something about the way Coke is pitched to us that references something very familiar, warm and fuzzy inside us," Dr Montague concludes. "It may have nothing to do with Coke's rationally thought-out branding strategy, but somehow the memory and brand image of Coke insinuates itself in the nervous system in a way that affects our behaviour. And Pepsi's does not. It could be as simple as the hard consonants in the word 'Coke', or it could be something about always using red. Whatever it is, we could see the effect."
Such findings, Dr Montague believes, will only encourage corporate marketing departments to delve deep within the human subconscious. As a scientist, this causes him some concern. "I'm a true believer that companies can really be evil," he says. "Just look at the tobacco companies. We're not safe just leaving this technology in the corporations' hands - they could put people into the scanners in search of all the signatures that correspond to behavioural biases."
The technology, meanwhile, continues to attract new corporate admirers. As MRI scanners become cheaper, smaller and more portable, Dr Montague can see neuromarketing specialists moving into most large corporate marketing departments. "Because that's neuroscience's goal, right? To decompose us into a set of computations that we can quantify. And if companies can turn feelings into numbers, and understand how the biological parts of our brains give rise to them, then think what they'll do with that knowledge." He pauses. "I can see why some people don't like that idea."
(Written for The Times Magazine, February 5 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, February 25, 2004
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