INTRODUCTION

Its easy for businesses to keep track of what we buy, but harder to figure out
why. Enter a nascent field called neuromarketing, which uses the tools of
neuroscience to determine why we prefer some products over others. People
are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much
they will pay for an item, says Uma R. Karmarkar, an assistant professor at
Harvard Business School who sports PhDs in both marketing and neuroscience.
But they arent very good at accessing where that value comes from, or how
and when it is influenced by factors like store displays or brands. Neuroscience
can help us understand those hidden elements of the decision process.
Neuromarketing is the tool which helps in unlocking the mysteries of consumer
choice.
Neuromarketing is an emerging field that bridges the study of consumer
behaviour with neuroscience. Controversial when it first emerged in 2002,
the field
is
gaining
rapid
credibility and adoption among advertising and marketing professionals. Each ye
ar,over 400 billion dollars is investedin advertising campaigns.Yet, conventional
methods for testing and predicting the effectiveness of those investments have
generally failed because they
depend on consumers
willingness
and
competency to describe how they feel when they are exposed to an
advertisement. Therefore, many major corporations have begun to take special
interest in understanding how the human brain can help them better understand
consumers. Neuro marketing offers cutting edge methods or directly probing
minds without requiring demanding cognitive or conscious participation
History of Neuromarketing
The combination of neuro and marketing implies the merging of two fields of
study
(neuroscience
and
marketing).The
term
neuromarketing cannot
be attributed to a particular individual as it started appearing somewhat
organically around 2002. At the time, a few U.S companies like Brighthouse and
SalesBrain became the first to offer neuromarketing research and consulting
services advocat-ing the use of technology and knowledge coming from the field
of
cognitive
neuroscience.
Basically
neuromarketingis to marketing what neuropsychology is to psychology.While
neuropsychology
studies the relationship between
the
brain and
human cognitive and psychological functions, neuromarketing promotes the
value of looking at consumer behavior from a brain perspective.
The first scholarly piece of neuromarketing research was performed by
Read Montague,
Professor of
Neuroscience
at Baylor College of Medicine in 2003 and published in Neuron in 2004. In a blindtaste test, consumers are asked to choose between Pepsi and Coca-Colaand to
no ones surprise, Pepsi wins. However, a decade ago, neuroscientist Read
Montague posed a question: If people truly prefer Pepsi over Coke, why isnt
Pepsi dominating the market?

Montague created a Pepsi Challenge of his own, hooking up his test subjects to
an MRI machine to track brain activity. At first, about half of the participants said
they preferred Pepsi; however, when Montague told them which samples were
Coca-Cola, preferences shifted to three-to-one in favor of Coke. Additionally, he
observed heightened activity had in the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that
controls higher thinking; as well as in the hippocampus, which relates to
memory.Montague concluded that the brain was recalling images and ideas from
commercials, and that the thoughts and emotions connected to the branding
were overriding reactions to the actual quality of the product. In 2004, he
published his findingsand as a result, neuromarketing emerged from the
shadows and into the public eye.
For what kinds of customers is neuromarketing effective?
Neuromarketing is a flexible method to determine customer preferences and
brand loyalty, because it can apply to nearly anyone who has developed an
opinion about a product or company. No matter what form it takes, marketing
focuses on creating positive and memorable impact in the minds of customers.
Neuromarketing measures those impacts, but anyone can take the basic
discoveries and adjust their product or sevice to reflect subconscious consumer
needs.
Sensory devices that create or evoke memories, for example, can be easily
employedthe aroma of fresh bread, recollections of past stories (either a
published work or a shared experience), evocative language, a song that gets
stuck in your head and wont come out -- ultimately, these are all effective (if
crude) examples of neuromarketing that can be used by nearly any business of
any size.