Bright Ideas - Marketing - A Neuromarketer on the Frontier of...

Back in high school, Ms. Yudofsky was participating in research into personality disorders at a Baylor medical laboratory at the same time a study was under way on neuroimaging and branding. The researchers were looking at consumer responses to brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. She watched as certain regions of the brain were activated when exposed to the familiar trappings of Coke but dormant for the Pepsi brand images. “Branding can change the way consumers make decisions, regardless of product,” Ms. Yudofsky concluded. “I thought that was fascinating.”

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The idea that monitoring brain activity can shed light on the consumer mind is tremendously controversial. The brain is far from fully understood, scientists point out: just because a neuron fires does not mean a consumer likes Coke better than Pepsi. There are also concerns that neuromarketing is a creepy invasion of privacy, and that the very premise is to manipulate unsuspecting consumers into buying products they don’t need. Those qualms have grown as neuromarketing has gained a higher profile. A new book on the subject, “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy,” by Martin Lindstrom, received considerable coverage this fall in business publications.

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