Attention Knaves and Varlets: Get Into Neuromarketing While the Getting Is Still Good

Always, always have an eye for the Main Chance:

 

"It's easy to make money in this market,"

"We'd better get in before they pass a law against it."

-Joseph P. Kennedy before becoming the first S.E.C. Commissioner

as quoted by Michael Beschloss

With the right attitude, opportunity is everywhere.
From the Guardian:

 

Porsche’s ad uses neuroscience imagery to compare its 

driving experience to flying a jet. 

Marketing has discovered neuroscience and the shiny new product has plenty of style but very little substance. “Neuromarketing” is lighting up the eyes of advertising executives and lightening the wallets of public relations companies. It promises to target the unconscious desires of consumers, which are supposedly revealed by measuring the brain. The more successful agencies have some of the world’s biggest brands on their books and these mega-corporations are happy to trumpet their use of brain science in targeting their key markets. The holy grail of neuromarketing is to predict which ads will lead to most sales before they’ve been released but the reality is a mixture of bad science, bullshit and hope.

First, it’s important to realise that the concept of neuroscience is used in different ways in marketing. Sometimes, it’s just an empty ploy aimed at consumers – the equivalent of putting a bikini-clad body next to your product for people who believe they’re above the bikini ploy. A recent Porsche advert apparently showed a neuroscience experiment suggesting that the brain reacts in a similar way to driving their car and flying a fighter jet, but it was all glitter and no gold. The images were computer-generated, the measurements impossible, and the scientist an actor.

In complete contrast, neuromarketing is also a serious research area. This is a scientifically sound, genuinely interesting field in cognitive science, where the response to products and consumer decision-making is understood on the level of body and mind. This might involve looking at how familiar brand logos engage the memory systems in the brain, or examining whether the direction of eye gaze of people in ads affects how attention-grabbing they are, or testing whether the brain’s electrical activity varies when watching subtly different ads. Like most of cognitive neuroscience, the studies are abstract, ultra-focused and a long way from everyday experience.

Finally, there is the murky but profitably grey area of applied neuromarketing, which is done by commercial companies for big-name clients. Here, the pop-culture hype that allows brain-based nonsense in consumer adverts meets the abstract and difficult-to-apply results from neuromarketing science. The result is an intoxicating but largely ineffective mix that makes sharp but non-specialist executives pay millions in the hope of maximising their return on branding and advertising.

Actually, it’s not always the case that executives are being sold a dud, sometimes they’re just being resold an established technique. For example, many neuromarketing companies use eye-tracking technology. Useful if you want to check whether your expensive ad will attract attention in the right places, but not “neuro”. Skin conductance can be used to check how physiologically arousing an ad might be. Again, interesting, but not a measure of the brain.

When you get to the actual neuroscience in applied neuromarketing, it is usually so poorly applied that it is either largely for show or is clearly not sufficiently understood by the people who are selling it. Most companies use EEG, a measure of the electrical activity of the brain through electrodes placed on the scalp. One problem is that these signals can be drowned out by electrical activity in the muscles and are sensitive to interference from other electrical devices. Genuine EEG research overcomes these problems by using extremely sensitive equipment in electrically shielded environments and by repeatedly doing the same tests, to average out any interference. Much of commercial neuromarketing EEG uses cheap kit, in poorly controlled, poorly designed experiments, that often produces junk data....MORE

 Previously on the scoundrel channel:

Are You a Recent Graduate Who Hasn't Found a Job? Consider Becoming a Charlatan
Follow-up: Choosing the Charlatan Career Path
"Fortune tellers, astrologers and economists"
"Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism...."
Forecasting: We Are All Charlatans
Con Man: "The Appearance of Being Earnest"