January 23rd, 2024
Written by: Catrina Hacker
Advertisements are a pervasive part of American culture. They line our highways, cover our buses, adorn our park benches, and litter our websites. We love ads so much that some of us watch the Superbowl just for the commercials1. But what makes a good advertisement? Over the last few years, marketing companies have become increasingly interested in measuring how our brains respond to products and advertisements to decide what to show us, an approach called neuromarketing. In this post I’ll break down the basics of neuromarketing and some of the ethical questions to consider as neuromarketing becomes a more popular approach.
What is neuromarketing?
For a long time, marketing companies have relied on feedback from test subjects to determine what kinds of products and advertisements work and which ones don’t. They have people fill out surveys or participate in focus groups where participants share their thoughts about different products or how commercials make them feel. This helps companies refine their products and advertisements before spending money on an ad campaign. One limitation of this approach is that participants don’t always understand why they make the choices that they do. While what a participant reports on a survey might be their best guess, it’s not always accurate. In comes neuromarketing.
Neuromarketing uses the same idea of participant feedback, but instead of having people fill out a survey or report their feelings, it uses measures of a person’s brain activity to determine how they react. In a well-known study conducted in 2004, researchers measured brain activity as consumers drank either Coca-Cola or Pepsi. It was already known that consumers are unreliable in how they evaluate these drinks. They struggle to tell them apart when they don’t know what they’re drinking but claim that their preferred brand tastes better when they do. The researchers found that different parts of the brain became active when people did or did not know the brand of their drink. In other words, while drinkers of Coke or Pepsi might say that the drinks just taste different, researchers could predict that they were using the brand name to evaluate how much they enjoyed the drink2.
If you read the last paragraph and wondered why a company would need brain data when they already knew that consumers were influenced by brand name, you’re not alone. In 2017, a marketing professor at UC Berkeley named Dr. Ming Hsu summarized this viewpoint as “neuroscience either tells me what I already know, or it tells me something new that I don’t care about”3. However, early studies like the one described earlier showed that measures of brain activity can predict how consumers make decisions, even if they’re not aware of their own biases, and many neuromarketing companies are already running with them. In addition to measures of brain activity like the ones I just described, neuromarketing also uses methods that indirectly measure brain processes, like eye movements or heart rate, to reliably determine which advertisements grab consumers’ attention.
With advancements in the technology used to measure brain activity and increasing numbers of companies dedicated to neuromarketing, a future where advertisers use your brain activity to decide what products to advertise to you and how is not out of the question.
Neuromarketing in practice
Neuromarketing is already influencing what appears on our screens. The neuromarketing company MindSign measured brain activity as participants watched several potential trailers for the 2009 movie Avatar to decide which scenes and trailers were most engaging4. Another study used measures of brain activity to predict which anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) would be most effective in discouraging smoking. They even found that people’s brain activity was better at predicting how they would respond to the PSA than their own report of how much they thought it influenced them5.
Neuromarketing is also teaching advertisers how to design more effective advertisements. For example, James Breeze, CEO of Objective Experience, measured eye movements as consumers looked at advertisements that included pictures of babies. He found that people are more likely to look at an advertised product when the baby is also looking at the product than when the baby is looking out toward the consumer6. Another example comes from the media company Nielsen, who claims that ads that produce a stronger emotional response, as measured by changes in brain activity as well as biological changes like heart rate, are more effective in increasing brand favorability7. Insights from neuroscience have also helped marketing companies pick colors, designs, and audiences for their ad campaigns.
While neuromarketing companies are making big claims, some neuroscientists are skeptical of how accurately brain activity can predict consumer behavior8,9. Neuroscientists themselves don’t agree on how neural activity relates to complex things like preferences or decision making, and pinpointing a single area of the brain where brain activity will relate to consumer behavior may be impossible. Making things even more complicated, brain activity in the same part of the brain can be related to many different processes. This means that if a scientist observes activity in a certain part of the brain, they can’t be sure which of many processes may have produced it. Not all neuroscientists share this skepticism, and indirect measures like eye movements and heart rate can be more reliable than direct measures of brain activity. Despite skepticism from the academic community, neuromarketing in practice has only continued to grow.
A matter of ethics
As you’ve now seen, neuromarketing is already being used by marketing companies, and as the technology used to record brain activity continues to get better, neuromarketing is likely to become even more common. As such, it’s worth considering some ethical questions surrounding present and future applications of this approach. There are no perfect answers to these questions, but as neuromarketing and other uses of your brain activity become more likely to impact your daily life, it’s valuable to consider where you stand on these issues.
One important question is: at what point can tapping into unconscious brain signals to guide consumer behavior be considered coercion? Advertisements are made to persuade and manipulate consumers into buying particular products. If a neuromarketing company discovers that quickly flashing a particular visual at the start of a commercial makes customers very likely to buy the product, even though they don’t remember seeing the visual, is that an allowable amount of manipulation? Or if an advertising company uses your brain activity to determine you may want to eat out tonight and then shows you ads for local restaurants that influence you to eat out, did you really make that decision yourself or were you coerced? Where do we draw the lines between influencing, manipulating, and coercing?
We’ve already seen the negative impact of companies working to grab as much of our time and attention as possible through the addictive effects of social media feeds and like buttons10. Social media companies design their feeds to make their users more likely to scroll to such an extent that many adults and teens are addicted to social media in ways that negatively impact their lives. To what extent are we willing to allow such manipulation via advertisements?
And while the ethical questions I’ve mentioned so far assume that neuromarketing works perfectly, we’ve also seen that some neuroscientists are skeptical about how reliable neuromarketing techniques can and ever will be. How much weight should we give to these measures of brain activity? If a neuromarketing firm says that a smoker’s brain activity predicts that they are unlikely to quit smoking, does that mean we shouldn’t bother showing them anti-smoking PSAs? Are we willing to classify people solely based on predictions made from their brain activity?
These questions might seem far-fetched or a matter of science fiction, and we’re certainly not at the point that modern technology can live up to many of these hypotheticals, but as companies get closer to making them a reality, we have the opportunity to ask just how far we want to allow them to go.
References
1. Share of Super Bowl viewers watching for ads 2021. Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290552/people-watching-super-bowl-for-ads/.
2. McClure, S. M. et al. Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks. Neuron 44, 379–387 (2004).
3. Hsu, M. Neuromarketing: Inside the Mind of the Consumer. Calif. Manage. Rev.
4. Magazine, S. & Eveleth, R. This Is Your Brain on Movies. Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-your-brain-on-movies-28518155/.
5. Falk, E. B., Berkman, E. T. & Lieberman, M. D. From Neural Responses to Population Behavior: Neural Focus Group Predicts Population-Level Media Effects. Psychol. Sci. 23, 439–445 (2012).
6. You Look where They Look – Eye Tracking in UX Research. https://www.objectiveexperience.com/eye-tracking-ux-research/ (2021).
7. We’re Ruled by Our Emotions, and So Are the Ads We Watch. Nielsen https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2016/were-ruled-by-our-emotions-and-so-are-the-ads-we-watch/.
8. Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B. & Rangel, A. Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105, 1050–1054 (2008).
9. Ariely, D. & Berns, G. S. Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 11, 284–292 (2010).
10. Fox, J. An unlikeable truth: Social media like buttons are designed to be addictive. They’re impacting our ability to think rationally. Index Censorsh. 47, 11–13 (2018).
Cover photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
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