The Insurgence of Neuromarketing — Neuroscience in marketing, cinema, and politics
Have you ever heard the phrase “I know you better than you know yourself?” You can probably imagine it coming from a close friend or family member. But what if it came from a machine that could read responses to stimuli in your brain instantly and know what you’re feeling before you do? We have already let AI into our homes with Google and Amazon Alexa but do these companies now want to get inside our heads, too?
Influencing buyers’ decisions and behavior is nothing new, so there’s no reason to start fearing new marketing strategies. The difference now is we have the technology to decode physical responses to stimuli, ranging from tracking eye movement to scanning brain activity. When companies mix these neuroscientific methods with marketing, it’s called Neuromarketing.
Some of the devices are new, but the active study of consumer behavior has been around for almost a century. There have been many experiments that determine the best colors for a brand, the best music for a commercial, or even the ideal number of choices.
Here’s one example of the latter. In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper designed an experiment to see how the number of choices affects decision-making. They set up two tasting booths in an upscale grocery store. One had 24 varieties of jam, and the other had only six. Initially, more shoppers were attracted to the stall with 24 varieties, but ultimately more people bought from the stall of six jams. Why? The conclusion of the experiment highlighted that if there are too many options, people are less likely to choose even one. It’s called decision paralysis. You may have come across this behavior (or lack thereof) when you were trying to find something to watch on Netflix.
A study like this shows what happens in a situation, but it doesn’t tell us why. That’s where Neuroscience comes into play. It shows us what happens to our brain and body when we’re standing in front of a variety of jams — who hasn’t wondered about that?
How does it work?
There are a number of different methods. All of them involve paid participants. See the infographic below to see some of the most common techniques.
Not all Neuroscience companies use every technique. It depends on what they are studying. For example, companies are beginning to move away from fMRI because of the high cost, the requirement for subjects to lie perfectly still during the examination, and the importance of rigorous analysis. The last point was further highlighted by a dead salmon, one that a neuroscientist decided to test in an fMRI machine in 2009.
“One of my PhD advisers and I made a game out of finding all kinds of things to scan, from a pumpkin to a game hen to a salmon.” Craig Bennett
Craig Bennett, a neuroscience student at the University of California, was asked to find false positives to show statistical errors in an fMRI. Logically, he picked a permanently unconscious Atlantic salmon. The salmon was shown a variety of photos depicting people in social situations, then asked which emotion the person in the photo was feeling. I’m sure Craig asked the pumpkin too. The results displayed activity in the dead salmon’s brain. The fMRI can be very useful, but this study showed how important it is to have multiple scans to compare.
Other than traditional biometrics (e.g., eye-tracking, facial coding, skin-conductance, heart rate, and respiration rate), the EEG is one of the dominating tools in neuroscience. It’s relatively easy to use since it only consists of wearing a headband with electrodes. The EEG can read a neural response in a fraction of a second, giving observers real-time reaction data. As technology improves, neuroscience companies are expanding their line of service. Initially, companies like Disney worked with neuroscientists to improve their brand. After a few years of experimenting, they started to find their potential for human behavior analysis in other areas.
In 2016, MediaScience, a neuroscience company, saw an opportunity to utilize their tools in US politics, specifically for predicting the US presidential election results of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. The traditional method for forecasting the winner is an election poll, which is notably unreliable. Using facial coding by reading expressions, MediaScience measured the intensity of voter reactions during the debates. There are 42 facial muscles, so you can imagine the amount of variety in our expressions.
While the polls suggested Hillary Clinton winning by a landslide, MediaSciences’ observations showed something different. Here’s what they saw: Republican voters expressed positive emotions when Trump spoke and negative emotions when Clinton spoke. However, Democratic voters expressed negative emotions for BOTH candidates.
“Democrats — even though they were saying positive things about Hillary, the biometric data showed just how much they disliked Hillary.”
Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience
While Varan of MediaScience has not expressed an interest in helping candidates directly, saying “We don’t want to taint our objectivity,” in an interview with Roger Dooley, Spencer Gerrol of Spark Neuro has. He even has support and investments from movie star Will Smith and Peter Thiel of Paypal, Palantir Technologies, and Facebook. After starting just over three years ago, Spark Neuro is the flashier neuromarketing company, being the first company to use fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), a portable fMRI-like device. They also work with movie studios to fine-tune movie trailers.
Like Spark Neuro, another company works with movie studios, but their work goes a little more in-depth. Neuro Focus puts EEG headsets on viewers in movie theaters to assess attention, emotional engagement, and memory with the end goal of creating “flop-proof” movies. This sounds like cheating, but studios have already been producing remakes and sequels to accomplish the same goal. It’s more cinematic noise we’ll have to endure, but hopefully, the technology will make the remakes a little more bearable.
Some scientists go beyond Neuromarketing and Neurocinematics. Nafees Hamid and Clara Pretus, university neuroscience researchers from London and Barcelona respectively, conducted an experiment to study the brains of terrorists in Barcelona. They used an fMRI on 38 participants in Barcelona who expressed an interest in using violence for jihadist reasons. Most of the candidates were not of Spanish origin.
Before the fMRI scan, each was asked to play a virtual game called Cyberball where they passed a ball with three similar-looking virtual players with Spanish names. The participants didn’t know that the Spanish players weren’t real, and half of the partakers were excluded by the virtual players. The other half of the participants were included and continued receiving passes from the virtual players.
After the game, the participants lied in an fMRI machine and filled out a survey about their willingness to fight and die for sacred and non-sacred values. The researchers, Hamid and Pretus, discovered that the excluded participants were much more willing to fight and die for non-sacred values than the non-excluded.
Research indicates that religious discrimination toward Muslim immigrants in Western Europe leads to economic and social exclusion (Adida et al., 2010), and when they feel marginalized (i.e., discriminated against and excluded), they increase support for radical groups (Lyons-Padilla et al., 2015).
Finding the underlying reasons for wanting violence could help the fight against terrorism. However, neuroscience still has a long way to go. A lot of the technology is new and still needs improvement. Companies need to see if the results are worth the money they invest. And governments need to see if they can actually use the data to fight the war on terrorism.
You can see how this technology overlaps in various fields. It can be used for identification when you enter a store to prevent theft. Some companies even use facial recognition and voice biometrics for the interview process to weed out candidates from jobs in high demand. There are still undiscovered uses for it. Maybe it can be used on shoppers to better generate a sales pitch? Or a toy that can read a child’s emotion and respond appropriately? In any case, this technology is new, and we still don’t know how it will impact our society. Good or bad, only time will tell.
And a little experiment…
In the following video, an image will pop up for two seconds. What did you see? Leave your answer in a comment below and see if others saw the same.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
