Paper Se Hyun Lee

WHAT DOES NEUROMAREKTING TELL US ABOUT OUR BRAIN?

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Research Paper What Does Neuromarketing Tell Us about Our Brain?

Strategic Marketing Management February 9, 2015

Se Hyun Lee 133505


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Abstract

Firms spend thousands of dollars for advertisement through different media channels such as TV,

Internet social media, radio, magazines and newspapers. Many of these advertisement methods

have the different levels exposers to potential customers, and the price of advertisement varies

based on the exposers to the customers. However, marketers realized that exposing the contents

of the advertisement is not everything of reaching out to the customers. As the advertisement

price increases the marketers want to make sure their marketing strategy and advertisement on

television screen really works well. As a result, the marketers approach to the area of the study,

neuromarketing, to research on how human brain works as they watch the advertisement on the

Television screen. Neuromarketing is the area of study, integrating both marketing and

neuroscience by using brain-scanning technology in order to study the response of human brain

to the television commercials and other marketing methods. Neuromarketing also has a

significant implication on research on decision-making process and how human emotion

affluence the human decision-making process. Neuromarketing has broad range of areas to

studies, but this paper will focus on human decision-making process, how it works in consumer’s

behavior based on literatures on neuromarketing.


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One of the largest events in the United States would be National Football League (NFL) Super

Bowl. There are many different reasons why people watch Super Bowl, but one of the reasons

revealed was that people watch Super Bowl to see the commercials. Ron Siltanen says, “Several

studies have proven that 50% of the Super Bowl audiences watch it just to watch the ads”.

(Siltanen) According to Siltanen, it cost 4 million dollars for 30-second spot, and 8 million

dollars for 60-second spot for advertisement. In order to make commercial cost 4 million, the

marketers have to make sure that the commercial should work worth more than 4 million at least.

This is a good example of why marketers were interested in investing on brain scanning

technology for addressing marketing issues from late 1990’s. (Wrenn, 2010, p. 1)

Neuromarketing is the term describes brain research on the effect of marketing stimuli. (Kotler,

2012, p. 108) By using braining-scanning technology, marketers are able to discover which part

of brain responds to the commercial or stimuli. And marketers want to know exactly when and

why customers make decisions to buy the products while the customers are exposed to the

products or the commercial. Therefore, neuromarketing is not only on a study of human behavior

in the market, but marketers have specific target and purpose of having neuromarketing strategy

in order to find what triggers the human decision-making behavior. Neuromarketing is not only

projected and utilized in business area, but also in politics. In the past decade, marketers and

politicians thought a lot about ways and meant to sell better their products and ideas, and they

realized that the traditional brain-scanning technology can be used as neuromarketing method.

(Vecchiato, 2013, p. 1)


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Two important reasons discussed in Vecchiato’s book are about why neuroelectric brain imaging

is relevant. First, Vecchiato says, “Marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more

efficient trade off between costs and benefits. It is based on assumption that people would not

share about their feeling.” Therefore, it is not possible for marketers to know their hidden

feelings and how this people make decisions. Thus, the marketers want to know about hidden

information, unconscious because emotion is an important part of brain to make decisions.

Second, “the marketers hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be

implemented even before a product exists.” It is also based on the assumption that neuroimaging

data would give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data rom standard

market research studies. (Vecchiato, 2013, p. 5)

There are few different methods in brain scanning. The first method is called

Electroencephalography, abbreviated as EEG. “EEG is a technology to correlate brand activity

with physiological cues such as skin temperature or eye movement to figure out how people

react to advertisement.” (Kotler, 2012) Also, “EEG is known as oldest method, uses electrodes

attached to the scalp to measure electrical activity synchronized to stimulus events or behavior

responses.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 12) EEG is relatively cheaper than other methods, so it is used

broadly. However, Brian Knutson describes EEG as “standing outside a baseball stadium and

listening to the crowd to figure out what happened.” (Kotler, 2012) basically, it implies that EEG

can show the researchers that there is a stimuli and our body respond back to it. However, it

doesn’t mean that we can trace back to the source to the original brain part that responded. Thus,

we may know that human brain responds to the commercial they watch, but EEG doesn’t tell us

which part of brain actually responded. Therefore, we cannot know what exactly and why our


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brain respond to certain way. The other method is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,

abbreviated as “fMRI.” Different from EEG, we can locate active system by using fMRI.

Because of fMRI technology, we can locate the spot, and figure out what cause people to

respond in certain way. (Wrenn, 2010, p 2.) Further, researchers can figure out whether the

response is coming from the part where emotion works or other parts dealing with reason in

human brains. Lastly, Magnetoencephalography is another method, and it is abbreviated as

MEG. MEG is a method that depends on the electrical character of neural signaling. As electric

currents cause magnetic fields, the brain and skull are surrounded by minute fluctuating magnetic

fields. This can be measured by “devices called SQUIDS (superconducting quantum interference

device) operating at the temperature of liquid helium.” (Ambler, 2014, p. 251 )

Neuroscience can attribute insightful background of neuromarketing. It is worth to take a look on

Two Dimensions of Neural Functioning chart.

Table 1

Two Dimensions of Neural F

Cognitive Affective Controlled Processes

- serial - effortful - evoked deliberately - good introspective

access

I

II

Automatic processes - parallel - effortless - reflexive - no introspective

access

III

IV

(Camerer, 2005, p. 16)


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“Automatic processes are not accessible to consciousness.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 13) Automatic

processes can be described as if human see someone attractive or people being sarcastic on their

attitude or language. The Amygdala, the part of brain is responsible for many important

automatic affective responses. (Camerer, 2005, p. 17) Thus, automatic processes can be

described as natural/unconscious decision-making process. “Controlled processes occur when

automatic affective response is interrupted.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 18) As a human faces situation

when our automatic processes cannot solve the problem, then controlled processes activated,

utilizing our cognitive function to make decisions. “Affect processes are embodies not only

human emotions but also drive states such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire and motivational

states such as physical pain, discomfort and drug craving.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 18) Cognitive

system is a process of making decision by reason, but cognition cannot motivate human.

Cognitive processes should work with affective system in order to see production of actions.

There is another insight from the research done by Richard Davidson, who argues that “the

prefrontal cortex is often considered to be the province of higher cognitive control, it has also

consistently been linked to various features of affective processing.” (Davidson, 2003, p. 317)

Davidson’s observation gives us implication that emotional input for human decision making has

significant role. Moreover, Davidson also states that “We and others have speculated that the

increase in activation in visual cortex in response to emotional stimuli may be a function of back

projections from the amygdala to primary vision cortex…the visual cortex is more activated in

response to the emotional compared with the nonemotional stimuli.” (Davidson, 2003, p. 320)

These are the evidences from neuroscience perspective that human emotion has significant

influence on human decision-makings. Neuromarketing experts seem to understand this already

and apply it to very practical terms. In the textbook it says, “as a largely unconscious habitual


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process, as distinct from the rational, conscious, information-processing model of economists

and traditional marketing textbooks” (Kotler, 2012) As Dr. Wrenn analyzed the Pepsi/Coke case

study in his article “Neuromarketing” states “the brands satisfy a powerful emotional need that

goes beyond the functional performance of the product” (Wrenn, 2010, p 3.)

Neuromarketing as this heavy emphasis on understanding human brain especially related to our

emotional behavior. It is obvious that human emotion will be getting involved with decision-

making process. Furthermore, even cognitive functions can be affected by affective (emotional)

system.

By adding neuromarketing technology does not give only positive messages to the society. There

are concerns in terms of business ethics on one side, and there are concerns on the relevancy of

the brain scanning methods. For someone who has concerns on ethics, they worry about

customer privacy issue, and developing emotional stimuli strategy on marketing might cause

customers become like a robot, being in a market without having free will to choose what to buy.

On the other side, there are still many people who are not convinced the fact that brain scanning

technology is relevant to read customer’s emotion. Although fMRI technology available for the

researchers to scan human brain to spot out the provinces where active vocalization happens

when the stimulation occurs, it is too early to make conclusion that vocalization of one segment

of the brain will cause emotion based decisions. There are many experiments documented, but it

was pointed out that the choices that participated experiments made may have different

causations other then just vocalization of one part of the brain. There have been ethical concerns

on neuromarketing because what if the researchers can find brain stimuli to stimulate the part of

brain to activate motivation to buy certain products without free will? One research states that

“neuromarketing within the neuroscience literature have strongly questioned the ethics of


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applying imaging techniques to the purpose of “finding the ‘buy button in the brain’ and ….

Creating advertising campaigns that we will be

unable to resist’” (Wrenn, 2010, p 3.)

On the positive side, marketing strategy will

become more practical. This is the example of

Alfa Romeo car model television commercial, and

University of Rome made EEG scanning on

selected people. When Alfa Romeo made video

commercial, they could able to see which

scene has weak impact and which other scenes

have frames that impact customers emotion.

So they were able to adjust the length of the

video according to the emotional rate so that

Alfa Romeo can target different groups of

people. At the same time, they could adjust the

length of the commercial based on the target

group in shorter running time. For example, Alfa Romeo had different edition of commercial for

Champion’s league soccer

game because the main target

would be male audience. And

the same commercial is

edited differently for women

audience. For this case, it


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would be a good example of utilizing neuromarketing technology.

The challenges for neuromarketing methods are familiarity. There is one research indicates, “We

cannot ignore familiarity because people tend to choose products which they are already familiar

with.” (Braeutigam, 2004, p. 299) Another study also mentions about familiarity. It says “when

familiarity is strong, decision making may related to just those processes where the outcome is

consistent with some form of intention.” (Ambler, 2004, p. 257)

Currently, Eye tracking, biometric and facial monitoring is also known for neuromarketing tools.

Biometric is using a device similar to a polygraph, known as lie detector. In polygraph consisted

of many other devices such as respiratory cuff, finger clamp that rests on participant’s finger to

measure galvanic skin response, and a blood pressure and a pulse monitor. Biometric is the way

to collect data from the body as participant’s body responds to the product or commercial.

(Howard and Merrell Coporation, 2015) Eye tracking is another way to get participant’s physical

responds. Eye tracking and facial monitoring are the tools to get the data from participants.

In conclusion, the bottom line for neuromarketing approach is that marketing experts cannot

ignore unconscious area of our human brain as customers make their decisions. Many researches

tried to find out how this under surface human mind works and interconnects to our daily routine

life. Many different forms of tools exist helped us to identify unconscious human mind has

influence especially as our brain makes decisions. For marketers’ stand point, marketing experts

should understand how these potential consumers think in their mind. Knowing about the

greatest needs in unconscious will give people confidence and feel comfortable to come back to


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have another business transaction. That’s why; neuromarketing can be useful to find the needs

and wants from customers. However, there is a story on the other side that marketers have to

remember that negative consequences or ethical implication on having neuromarketing stretagy.

As authors of journals mentions, it is important to be reminded that neuromarketing methods are

not recognized universally. Although neuromarketing methods are used in many different

marketing areas, but neuromarketing methods itself cannot stand alone to prove the causation of

decision making in human brain. Therefore, marketers should be aware that neuromarketing

itself is not the final answer for their research.

Although neuromarketing has its weak point, the methods can be utilized in many different ways

to improve engaging with potential customers. As Alfa Romeo’s commercial case indicated,

EER or fMRI can help marketing process if neuromarketing tools were used to identify the

different perceptions of different gender groups. Alfa Romeo’s way of employing

neuromarketing strategy seems appropriate. But neuromarketng methods and tools shouldn’t be

trying to bypass the opportunity for human brain to digest the information. Furthermore,

neuromarketing methods should not be used to create stimulation on human brain to make

decision based on inappropriate information and stimulation.


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Ambler, T., Braeutigam, S., Stins, J., Rose, S., & Swithenby, S. (2004). Salience and choice: Neural correlates of shopping decisions. Psychology and Marketing, 247-261. Ambler, T., Ioannides, A., & Rose, S. (2000). Brands on the Brain: Neuro-Images of Advertising. Business Strategy Review, 11(3), 17-30. Berns, G., McClure, S., Pagnoni, C., & Montague, R. (2001). Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward. The Journal of Neuroscience, 21(8), 2793-2798. Braeutigam, S., Rose, S., Swithenby, S., & Ambler, T. (2004). The Distributed Neuronal Systems Supporting Choice-making In Real-life Situations: Differences Between Men And Women When Choosing Groceries Detected Using Magnetoencephalography. European Journal of Neuroscience, 20, 293-302. Breiter, H., Aharon, I., Kahneman, D., Dale, A., & Shizgal, P. (2001). Functional Imaging Of Neural Responses To Expectancy And Experience Of Monetary Gains And Losses. Neuron, 30, 619-639. Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2005). Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 9-64. Davidson, R. (2003). Darwin and the Neural Bases of Emotion and Affective Style. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 316-336. Fried Logic. (n.d.). Retrieved February 9, 2015, from http://www.howardmerrell.com/friedlogic/2013/12/31/biometrics-in-neuromarketing/ Kotler, P., & Keller, K. (2012). Conducting Marketing Research. In Marketing management (14th [ed.]. ed., p. 108). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Lee, N., Broderick, A., & Chamberlain, L. (2006). What Is ‘neuromarketing’? A Discussion And Agenda For Future Research. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 199-204. Singer, N. (2010, November 13). Making Ads That Whisper to the Brain. Retrieved February 9, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html?_r=0 Plessis, E. (2005). The advertised mind ground-breaking insights into how our brains respond to advertising. London: Millward Brown/Kogan Page. Siltanen, R. (2014, January 8). Yes, A Super Bowl Ad Really Is Worth $4 Million. Retrieved February 9, 2015, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2014/01/29/yes-a-super-bowl-ad-really-is-worth-4-million/ Wrenn, B. (2010). Neuromarketing. Andrews University. Vecchiato, G. (2013). Neuroelectrical brain imaging tools for the study of the efficacy of TV advertising stimuli and their application to neuromarketing. Berlin: Springer.


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Paper Se Hyun Lee