Brain studies used by marketers

Taking a survey no longer means half-heartedly filling out a form full of yes/no questions. Marketers and scientists have pooled their knowledge to create "neuromarketing," which aims to read consumers' minds to find out what they really think about everything from politics to cars and movies.

The technique neuromarketing takes advantage of is called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Doctors developed fMRI in 1993 to measure brain activity for clinical purposes.

An fMRI uses radio waves and a magnetic field to map out an exact picture of the brain. By taking a few snapshots while a patient is performing a simple task, scientists and doctors can determine what parts of the brain handle such functions as speech, movement and decision making. As Dr. Susan Courtney, an associate professor in the Hopkins psychology department put it, "fMRI is an indirect measure of changes in neural activity over time as a person looks at images, hears sounds [or] does a task." This information can be useful in studying how such things as strokes, Alzheimer's disease and a variety of mental disorders effect the brain.

Marketers, however, show little interest in the brain patterns of psychiatric patients. Rather, they want to know how the brains of normal consumers make decisions about what products to buy.

Neuromarketing has its roots in a 2004 study by scientists at Baylor College of Medicine who used fMRI to observe the brain patterns of people given Coke or Pepsi. Their research, published in the journal Neuron, found that when the sodas were not identified, test subjects showed no difference in brain activity between the two.

However, when they showed a Coke label to the participants, areas of the brain associated with pleasure lit up, regardless of which soda they were drinking and whether they claimed to actually prefer Pepsi. The conclusion: Coke's advertising is literally engrained into the minds of consumers.

Food companies are not the only ones interested in getting into the minds of their customers. A March 2004 article in Newsweek International cites Ford of Europe and DaimlerChrysler as funding studies on neuromarketing. These automobile giants hope to learn what factors people take into consideration when they are buying a new car.

Research such as that which DaimlerChrysler sponsors is already getting results. Neuroscientists have succeeded in roughly mapping out what regions of the brain are activated as a consumer decides to buy a product, an act that takes about 2.5 seconds. The visual cortex first becomes active, followed by memory circuits in the left inferotemporal cortex.

Marketers have dozens of questions they hope will be answered through studying just how this process works. What types of television ads stick in the minds of consumers for the longest? How does the brain respond to the sound of a crunching candy bar?

However not everyone thinks that finding the answers to these questions is a good idea. Critics say that if marketers find the areas of the brain that tell consumers when to buy something, they would theoretically be able to addict people to almost anything.

This summer Commerical Alert, a public-interest group whose slogan is "Protecting communities from commercialism," asked the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to investigate the legality of neuromarketing, especially its use by tobacco, alcohol, junk food and gambling companies. The Senate Commerce Committee has not responded.

Though some of these uses of fMRI makes the technique sound like an Orwellian invasion of privacy, doctors and neuroscientists are getting loads of valuable scientific information out of the method as well.

Even with this vast amount of data, scientists and neuromarketers are still far from understanding how every facet of our minds works and even farther from being able to control our brains. Dr. Courtney explains that, "the big leap from the fMRI results to marketing is figuring out what increased activity in a particular part of the brain means." Neuromarketers work off all sorts of assumptions that could easily be wrong.

Whether our brains are literally being read or not, the age-old power of advertising will always exhibit a familiar tug on us as we stand in the grocery store aisle trying to choose what brand of soda to buy.