Marketing on the Brain

By | August 17, 2015

The 101 Sales, Marketing and Management Ideas featured in this issue came from agents, managers, columnists, consultants, researchers, techies, editors and others. We cast a wide net. Even Steve Jobs and Teddy Roosevelt contributed (although we didn’t tell them).

With so many contributing, we didn’t think to ask the neighborhood neuroscientist but maybe we should have.

As we all know, marketers would love to get inside consumers’ heads. Now it appears they can. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI is an upgraded MRI machine for the brain) to see if what people say about brands matches what they are actually thinking. The academics are testing the classic marketing proposition that consumers associate human-like characteristics with brands. This is sometimes called brand personality.

Their paper, “From ‘Where’ to ‘What’: Distributed Representations of Brand Associations in the Human Brain,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research (August 2015), was authored by Ming Hsu and Leif Nelson, Berkeley-Haas marketing professors, and Yu-Ping Chen, Ph.D.

An MRI of a customer's brain reveals a brand's personality.

The study’s participants have their brains scanned while they view logos of well-known brands including Apple, Disney, Ikea, BMW and Nestle. After they finish the scan, the participants then take a survey that asks about the characteristics that they associated with each brand. Next, using a set of data mining algorithms, the researchers use the participants’ brain activity to predict the survey responses.

“We were able to predict participants’ survey responses solely from their brain activity,” says Chen. “That is, rather than taking participants’ word at face value, we can look to their neural signatures for validation.”

The authors say the results provide marketers with a rigorous method that they can potentially use to verify core customer insights. So long focus groups.

“Surveys and focus groups are the workhorses for generating customer insights. They are fast, inexpensive, and offer tremendous value for marketers,” said Hsu, senior author of the study, “However, the inherent subjectivity of these measures can sometimes generate skepticism and confusion within companies, often leading to difficult conversations between managers within marketing and those outside.”

MRI machines can be bought for as little as $150,000 these days but an fMRI is another story, with prices starting at $1 million. Thus we suspect it’s going be a while before the boss will pay for an fMRI machine for the marketing department.

However, the next time someone scoffs that marketing isn’t brain surgery, ask them if they are sure about that.

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