Neuromarketing - Scam or Threat?

I thought I'd do an overview on this 'phenomenon' since everyone seems to be talking about it - for our own 'education' Have a look at the Fallon (US I presume) Planners' Blog on the topic. (The ads they're talking about are American so it's a bit difficult to understand all the detail but still very interesting). Anyway, the planners are having a lot of fun rubbishing brain-scanning as adding anything to our understanding of how ads work. They may be right about this but I'm not sure we can or should dismiss these methods - quite - as easily dismissed. By the way, we're talking of updated techniques - mainly they're using something called fMRI which shows which parts of the brain are active when an ad is being 'processed'. I was especially interested in the finding that the Dove campaign (presume it's the same 'real women' one we have in Europe) is endorsed by women when they post-rationalise their response but actually makes no impact on an emotional level on a brain scan. I haven't done groups on this but I would have expected this head vs heart dichotomy in response to the campaign - based on my knowledge of people/women - it's at least interesting that 'science' seems to confirm this. Also, I gather from the posts that the scans could raise the ugly old question as to whether some really irritating, 'poor' ads may not actually be rather effective on consumers… Having said that, there are quite a lot of queries around neuroscience in marketing - and advertising research - some of which are touched upon by Fallon. For me the key question is - what is anyone on a day-to-day basis going to do with brain scans on finished ads? Post-analysis is all well and good but clearly the challenge is to help develop effective advertising not to assess it after the event, ie after money has been spent. And I'm not sure what brain scans during exposure to unfinished ads (vs the finished Superbowl ones) would tell us about their potential. The scans would still need interpretation and projection into the future by an ad literate researcher, so would they be worth the costly technology? Could scans be a back-up for us or would they just confirm what we'd know anyway and could elicit by researchers' common sense, interpretation and careful questioning - ie by the use of projectives? Is it all just a waste of money? Since I've started writing this I've read a bit more around the subject and looking at some of the 'classic' examples (re-hashed again and again) mainly in the US media I'm unconvinced that the method is adding much in terms of insights - as yet. Just have a look at this article. So, the old non-blind Coke vs Pepsi preference is due to branding. Wow. Sports cars are linked to sex in men's brains - their reward centres light up when they see a sports car but not when they look at an estate. Well I never. What's really amazing here - as has been observed by others is that neuromarketers get press coverage and sell their wares on the back of such shocking banalities and that there are calls to stop their 'unethical' methods which are feared will lead to manipulative marketers pressing the 'buy' button on helpless consumers. If only life were so easy! But on to why we should take this seriously: One of the main reasons for neuroscience raising its head in market research is scientific confirmation of the idea that people tend to post-rationalise their behaviour - but didn't we always know that anyway? Which qual researcher worth her salt takes consumer response always as read? Is the issue here about measurability and replicability and clients' mistrust of 'mere' informed qual expertise? Chris Forrest from The Nursery explores this in depth in an MRS paper International Journal of Market Research - Article Viewer (subscription) and comes to the conclusion that clients' need for certainty - ideally underpinned by numbers - is likely to be satisfied by some of the (more or less pseudo-)neuroscientific insights and that we should take this threat to our more 'humanistic' approach to marketing/research quite seriously. I agree with him that we need to work on some methods ('neuroscience lite' he calls it, like it!) or at least on some answers to challenges to our profession which query its very premise - ie our ability to ask and consumers being able to answer questions about their motivations. As always, Wendy Gordon in the International Journal of Market Research (subscription only) is interesting on this and suggests that we work with the insights coming out of neuroscience - she recommends 'bricolage' (though can't remember whether she uses the actual word), ie a mix of different methods - including observation and desk research - as we can't completely trust any method to deliver the 'truth', so our safest bet is to tackle a research brief from different methodological angles. I completely agree but fear that a healthy mistrust of the concept of 'one truth' goes against the grain of current corporate climates . The supposed certainty of the neuromarketers accommodates pressures on clients to PROVE numerically the effectiveness of their marketing activities - even if it may be less insightful or useful than what Chris Forester calls 'humanistic' approaches. As a professor of advertising told the New York Times magazine 'A lot of it is garbage, but it's powerful garbage'...