Neuromarketing
The Consumer Insights Interest Group on LinkedIn today had a question about “What is the future of neuromarketing?” For those of you not in that group, here was my comment:
There are three streams of neuromarketing, and all will become more important in the future, because neuroscience and psychology has turned our understanding of decision making upside down.
1. Deep understanding of what happens in the brain, using fMRI. This will remain a fundamental research tool that will help us understand consumers at a basic level. But it will not become usable for tactical, or even strategic, marketing applications, because it will remain very expensive.
2. Gross understanding of what happens in the brain. Using EEG to understand what areas of the brain are active in response to marketing stimuli will continue to have a place. As Howard notes, its value is so far not established. We already have the means to measure conscious, cognitive events that take place in the brain by using traditional question and answer research. What is missing is an ability to understand what is going on at the non-conscious level, where emotions assemble and correlate the data that eventually get summed up as a conscious decision. I believe that EEG is going to have a difficult task finding consistent data that correlates to those emotional events. However, I am not an EEG specialist, so I am prepared to be wrong.
3. Understanding fundamental non-conscious emotional response by observing outcomes of changes in the autonomic nervous system. These include changes in skin conductance, heart rate, facial muscles, and eye movement. Before anything happens in the brain, our body is already reacting, and all of these signals are easily measurable. Emotions happen in the heart, not in the brain. And yes, there is a bank of data that a marketer can understand. While these signals are easily measurable, they are not easily interpretable. That is the area that is underdeveloped, and that is what we are working on. The AnswerStream system we developed at Howard Merrell is such a bank of data.
Traditional survey and qualitative methods will never go away. But they will become just one part of the toolbox. As our understanding of how human beings use emotion to make decisions expands, the importance of the “rational” choices we measure with techniques like conjoint will shrink.
