Neuromarketers Pick the Brains of Consumers 166
Pickens points out a story at The Guardian about the development of neuromarketing, the method by which advertisers track signals inside the brain to roughly extrapolate how a consumer reacts to products and advertisements. We've discussed this technique in the past, but now consulting firms are appearing who have begun to use this research to increase the effectiveness of their marketing practices. The author also notes a paper which elaborates on the scientific details (PDF).
"At McLean Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric institution run by Harvard University, an advertising agency recently sponsored an experiment in which the brains of half-a-dozen young whiskey drinkers were scanned. The goal, according to a report in Business Week, was 'to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar'. The results were used to fine-tune an ad campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels."
It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar to Interface (Score:5, Insightful)
In the book the people backing the lead character's bid for the presidency have a virtual "focus group" of people across the nation that watch his speeches. They are able to make adjustments to the speeches in real time by monitoring the reactions of the focus group's vitals.
I, for one, think that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but quickly becoming creepier as well.
why not skip the bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Similar to Interface (Score:3, Insightful)
Cue the chorus... (Score:5, Insightful)
More than to brainwash us to buy individual products, the main work that advertising performs is to condition our basic assumptions about how we as individuals relate to other individuals and objects. Almost all ads say similar things to us; things like that freedom can be reduced to that of the marketplace, that our individuality is defined by our consumption choices, that we are always, always lacking *something* in ourselves but that happiness and completeness are only a purchase away...
And no, I'm not trying to deny the influence our marketing-saturated world has had on *me*. I just resent it, and the marketeers who helped create such a system.
When does it stop being everyday spruking... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here I guess.
Of course the thought of some trailer-tr@sh soaking up the latest food-o-matic-slicer-dicer-3001 suggests we're way past that point. However, if even educated people are enticed, then that might be the sign that it is more manipulation that advertising, and it shouldn't be allowed.
Actually I guess that even being edumacated hasn't been less-and-less protection in the past few decades...but I wouldn't bet on seeing US governing bodies making any changes to reduce that.
advertise
1. to announce or praise (a product, service, etc.) in some public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use it: to advertise a new brand of toothpaste.
manipulate
1. to manage or influence skillfully, esp. in an unfair manner, eg: to manipulate people's feelings.
This is creepy, but what's really new here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, marketers using technology to quite literally get inside your head is a very creepy prospect. But marketers have been using everything at their disposal to get into your head since forever. How is this different?
Personally I find the fact that there's a multi-trillion dollar industry working full time in an effort to manipulate my conscious and subconscious mind into believing that corporation X is my friend and that I desperately need they're crap in order to be a worthwhile individual already is creepy enough.
The fact that this industry's influence is so pervasive they can subject each of us to thousands of hours of their propaganda before we're even old enough to think makes that doubly so. There is good research showing that more 4 year olds now recognise the mcdonalds logo that most common animals or shapes.
I also particularly love this
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
No skin off my back... I haven't actually paid attention to a commercial for years, and I only read print ads that are in scientific and tech related publications.
While on the subject, I have often thought it would be nice if ads were filled with enough technical data about a product to perform a comparative evaluation against similar product ads. I doubt that will ever happen, though.
Re:Cue the chorus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Try this. I make my own vodka. I don't sell it (A, great flavor, B, uncle scam would assault me with the full weight of its bureaucratic thugs... thus, I withhold the goodies for my own consumption.)
I'll give free advice. If you spice vodka and mix it with various fruit juices (or plain water) it becomes rum. Depending on the mixtures, pure vodka can become pretty much any other drink. Just get some nice wooden barrels, proper filtration techniques and materials and distill away. (Something which you can, for the most part or a very tiny cost, make all by yourself, or the help of an industrious friend.)
Help yourself man.
I'll add a little more, I make my own wine, I often cook, I'm not great at all forms of cooking, yet, but I'm pretty good with some things (it is a LOT simpler than you think, and if you're a man, sane women will appreciate your company all the more for that skill)... but that doesn't mean that sometimes I don't go out and spend a week or more in the wild, with only a gun, a knife, a single bar of unscented soap and my knapsack for company... I have friends who take their bows, a knife and nothing but that for months on end... I'm not as tough as they are, yet. By the same token, I also occasionally enjoy going to a fancy restaurant... sometimes just to a burger joint. Its all about choices.
And short of not consuming food or air, or water, you DO always consume something, some of it is freely available in a pure form, and other stuff requires that human labor or inventivity (tool use) be applied to it in order to make that resource usable.
Stop bitching about marketing, and instead try to develop an immune system for yourself and those you love. Be immune to subliminal advertising by spotting what they are doing to you subconsciously. When you're actively looking for the pitch, you become incredibly hard to sell to. If you take it far enough, you will become impossible to sell to, even if the seller is honestly selling you something worthwhile at a good price.
Also, learn to haggle. America and the west are heading back to independence, and the vast unwashed masses will be dragged along kicking and screaming.
You have a hatred of the market, which generally just exists to fulfill wants and needs. What you may want to try is to develop the ability to make informed choices, as to what to patronize and what to avoid. What to make for yourself, and what to let others make for you... The market has existed for 6000 years that we can mostly verify, and probably much longer. Neither You nor I, nor the "anti establishment" groupies won't kill it. Rather understand it as a force, and figure out how to NOT be taken in by those who play dirty.
Personally I like having liquor in the house. Tobacco too... not cigarettes mind you, they're too cheap, too poorly filtered, and too likely to get you addicted, cigars and pipes/filler are expensive and thus reduce the smoker to actually having a reason to do it, rather than as a way to fidget... fidgeting is free using just hands and feet. I like having a pool table, a computer on which I can log into other computers and we can bitch about the unfairness of the world. Personally I like being able to shave my beard, and brush my teeth. I don't think very highly of toothpaste but I make a few of my own concoctions that do less damage and leave less crap on my teeth, and won't cause me fluorosis. I like soap. I like deodorants. I buy some, but I know how to make all of them. Amusing? Why should it be? Humans are inventive. We're the apex super predator EXACTLY because we're tool users, not just another animal. We're THE animal in our entire ecosystem. We got out of the mud through our usage of tools, especially that most important tool, that thing inside our skull. Yet once we all got out of the mud, many seem to have forgotten how and why we did it, and many are stuck bitching about how unfair the world is, rather than doing what the winners of this little ga
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. I'm sure the marketers are pleased. The less conscious you are of their message, the less capable you are of resisting it.
Who's marketing to whom?? (Score:4, Insightful)
The neuromarketers dazzle the advertisers with high tech research tools and high-concept pseudoscience and charge a lot of money for the privlidge. Quite a scam.
What upsets me is that the waiting lists for MRI scans for legitiment medical uses can be weeks or even months long (in Canada at least), while these expensive machines, and the scarce qualified persons that operate them, are tied up for completely "frivilous", and likely totally useless purposes.
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You said it perfectly right here: "marketers are merely helping you fulfill this need by pushing past other products' attempts to get you to purchase them."
This is the crux of the problem, because it belies a conceit that marketers have: that their product is a better choice than all competitors for their entire target group. This is unspeakably arrogant for starters, and unbelievably annoying when, naturally, every marketer believes this about their product, so you get 100 products all arrogantly claiming to be the right choice for me and in all likelihood drowning out the one choice that is in fact right for me, which in my case is almost never the one with the biggest pockets.
Re:why not skip the bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare it to the other economic/political structures where one or both freedoms are missing.
Hype alert (Score:4, Insightful)
The article then jumps from these admittedly interesting results to start musing about 'what if "they" could read or even influence your mind as you walk into the shop' - which is of course utter nonsense. As things stand now you still require expensive machinery - you cannot 'scan' people's thought as they pass, and it is not likely that it will ever be possible to pick out individuals in a crowd anyway; and you cannot subject people to strong magnetic fields etc on a daily basis, it is simply too bad for their health. Put on top of that the fact that our actual thoughts are not something that can be easily interpreted from the electrical state of your brain - even if one could work out a precise rule book that would allow us to read the thoughts of one person, there is no guarantee that the same rules would work for somebody else. Each person has a unique brain, which is why they have different taste, reach different conclusions from the same facts and behave in different ways. What you can do is see some of the basic ingredients of our state of mind - how much anxiety, elation, sexual arousal, hunger etc - but one can't really tell what decisions a person will make, at least not in much detail. The complexity in doing this is as great as or even greater than predicting the weather.
So where does this leave things? The advertising agency now believes they can design better marketing campaigns because they have used 'scientific data'; but the fact is that all they can hope for is to strike a chord with an average of people. This doesn't really change a thing - it is not difficult to predict average behaviour, but it is next to impossible to predict what an individual will do. As far as I can see, this is just an advert: an advert for the agency.
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I only think marketers are evil as it is because of them that I'm bombarded with innumerable messages I'm not in the least interested in.
If you want me to buy a product, make a good product.
Don't try to show me how people are having fun, having sex or having cake; I'm not interested in pretty little stories. I know you lie, or at least consciously break the Gricean maxims, hoping no-one would notice.
About the only thing conventional marketing can make me do is decide not to buy the advertised product. Annoy me enough and that's exactly what is going to happen.
Good: show me the product.
Bad: show me pretty little stories with little or no relation to the product.
Good: discrete ads. If I'm interested, I'll se it.
Bad: ubiquitous flashing and screaming ads that make me switch the channel, enable ad blocking et al.
And no, I don't think marketers want to make me buy stuff I don't want.
That would be idiotic.
Marketers want to make me want stuff I don't need, or even make me need stuff I don't presently need.
Will you try to dispute that point as well?
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats the point, the need they exploit has nothing to do with the product they sell. Budweiser doesn't make me more popular with the ladies, nor the life of the party (unless the lady is a urinal, and the party is the hopping mens room culture). Car X doesn't make me a sexy, rich, race car driver. Nikes and Gatorade don't make me any less of a nonathletic geek. And the last time I drank a liquor that was advertised I didn't get suave, unless suave really means rowdy, sweaty, and hitting on fat chicks.
Advertising usually goes for cheap psychological gimmicks, rather than actually explaining why Pepsi is better than Coke, or telling me why a crappy plastic mop is better than the one I own.
In short, they lie. Advertising is just manipulation, and I, for one, do not like to be manipulated. If advertising actually told me WHY I need the product, I might be convinced, giving a genuine need.
Also I think there is a backlash because it is EVERYWHERE. You can't escape it, EVER. Every bus (school, or public), every show, every game, every webpage, the sky, the roads, etc... all deluge us constantly with the same cheap psychological gimmicks. They are tacky, ugly, and distractive (the latter being the goal).
They also lead to a superficial culture, since people actually buy into them. I once knew a girl who had a Nike "swoosh" tattooed on her arm, and a Calvin pissing on a Chevy logo on her truck. I asked her why. She told me that she agreed with what Nike stood for (crappy over-priced tennis shoes mad in asian sweatshops?), and that anyone who didn't like Ford was a pussy. We are bombarded with these stupid images so much that they HAVE TO influence our psychology, self, and culture. Its another step away from reality. Branding isn't real.
Sometimes Slashdot is pathetic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It probably isn't illegal now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my days, the objective of marketing was to boost profits, and the ultimate wet dream was to find a means to make people addicted.
CC.
And here is what you are missing. (Score:4, Insightful)
>Don't try to show me how people are having fun, having sex or having cake;
>I'm not interested in pretty little stories. I know you lie, or at least
>consciously break the Gricean maxims, hoping no-one would notice.
Here's the rub, though: Marketing research has virtually
It's easy to get up on the high horse on the Internet and say, "I'm too bright to fall for all that marketing crap.", but, as the article shows, there is a ton of research that goes into finding out what marketing _works_.