David StonehouseTechnology

Neuromarketing: Firms look deeper to seduce consumers

Forget focus groups. David Stonehouse reports how technology can help sellers to sell by finding out what makes buyers buy.

A U.S. company is revealing new insights into the mind of the consumer by using a tool usually reserved for medicine and science: the MRI.

And BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences says magnetic resonance imaging is peeling back some of the mysteries of consumer behaviour by showing how the brain reacts to products and pitches.

"We think it is tremendously powerful," company president Brian Hankin says from the firm's head office in Atlanta. "It is a way to uncover unprecedented insight into how people think about the world, express preference, develop preference, and how that translates into buying behaviour."

For the first time, he says, it is possible to see how the consumer truly reacts, even on a subconscious level.

"A lot of human cognition takes place below the level of awareness, so we make decisions every day in really everything we do at a unconscious level," says Mr. Hankin, a former marketer with The Coca-Cola Co. "And neuroimaging becomes really interesting there because it gets to the unconscious."

Studies by the company use functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to reveal brain activity when test subjects are confronted with products or advertising campaigns. The imaging technique is a relatively new advance with MRI machines used in medical diagnosis and shows the brain at work by taking detailed snapshots of its blood flow.

BrightHouse says it has so far identified distinctly different brain activity patterns depending on whether a person likes something or dislikes it.

For instance, if a man sees a commercial for BMW, an fMRI scan of his brain is likely to show plenty of activity in the pleasure centres of the brain -- activity that would not be there if confronted with something he is not fond of.

"In the future, we can bring a consumer in and have them look at a product and know, based on their brain response, whether it is a negative thing, whether it is a positive thing, how strongly are they attached to it," explains BrightHouse research scientist Justine Meaux." Do they love it? Or do they somewhat like it? Do they hate it? Are they neutral about it?"

The company, founded by researchers at Emory University and launched last summer, is setting up another round of studies to try to determine from scans when a person has decided to buy something. That research is not expected to be complete before next fall.

It has already been working for a major consumer products company, whose identity Mr. Hankin declines to disclose.

BrightHouse says neuroimaging will revolutionize the marketing industry by providing a glimpse of consumer thinking that traditional tools -- such as focus groups -- cannot reveal.

"Neuro scientists would estimate that about 95 per cent of what motivates our behaviour is operating below the level of conscious awareness," Ms. Meaux says. "So we are not always aware of what draws us to be loyal to one brand versus another, and therefore it is going to be difficult to report those in a meaningful way in a survey or a focus group. When you are looking at a brain's response, you are getting both a conscious and an unconscious response. You don't have to worry about that problem."

Adds Mr. Hankin: "If you were conduct a series of focus groups, there is often group- think, where one individual is swaying the opinions of an entire group.

"Often times, in every focus group, you have people who are holding back, afraid to admit something because of how they think it might make them look in front of their peers. "

That, he says, is where the scans become quite powerful.

Still, he emphasizes it will not be possible to use the scans to literally read someone's mind and see exactly what they are thinking about a product or campaign.

"We can't put someone in the scanner and observe, or have any idea of, what you are thinking about, what you did last night, how you feel about a particular issue. There is no way for us to do that, and there is no desire clearly to do that," he says. "We're not sort of in a back booth somewhere with a tarot card reader predicting the future. This is based in science."

Nor, the company says, is this about manipulating consumers by exploiting the new insights into their minds. It says this is aimed at helping companies respond to what people want.

"This isn't so much about changing the way consumers behave. We don't want make somebody buy a product that they don't want," Ms. Meaux says." That's almost impossible to do. If you have a strong negative preference about something, I can't make you like it.

"This is more about changing the way that companies communicate with us and listen to us, so that they can deliver better products and services."

A Canadian marketing expert suspects that some day the technology will work for marketers but right now it is unproven and costly compared with traditional methods.

"The simple fact is, rather than spend the tens of thousands of dollars that it costs to put an individual consumer into an fMRI, you can survey a whole lot of consumers and ask them about their preferences," says Scott Hawkins, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

"There aren't going to be that many situations where you are going to find the fMRI is going to add additional insight into what the consumer themselves is telling you. So in that sense, there is a big question about the economics of this approach to predicting consumer preferences."