Word: fmri
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...recent Wednesday night, Eleanor Phipp spent and hour watching commercial television. Nothing unusual about that--except that Phipp, 30, was in a dark room at a South London medical center, lying inside a loudly whirring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner that mapped her brain as video images flickered before her eyes. Brain scanners, which use radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to trace oxygenated blood to areas of neural activity, are used mainly to study or diagnose brain diseases. But Phipp's brain was being scrutinized by researchers to see how it reacted to the TV pictures--specifically...
...study is being run by Neurosense, a consulting firm based in Oxford, England, and a leader in the fast-growing industry called neuromarketing. Neuromarketing uses neuroscience--particularly fMRI scanners--to better understand how our brain reacts to advertising, brands and products, reactions that for the most part occur subconsciously. The burgeoning ability to understand how the black box of the brain processes images and messages and reaches decisions potentially gives marketers a new tool to fine-tune ads and marketing campaigns, bolster and extend brands and design better products. "It can give valuable information that's not particularly easy...
...Peter Walla, a neurobiologist who teaches at three schools, including Vienna University. German researcher Peter Kenning says when he did a Google Internet search on the term neuromarketing five years ago, he turned up a couple of hits; today, a similar search yields more than 200,000. FMRI technology emerged only around 15 years ago. Efforts to combine it with marketing began in the late 1990s; indeed, Neurosense was launched in 1997. The appellation neuromarketing popped up several years later, possibly coined by Ale Smidts, a marketing professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. It's essentially a subgenre of another...
...field got a high-profile, scholarly boost two years ago when a study by Baylor College of Medicine in Houston - which was published in the academic journal Neuron - used FMRI technology to determine that cola drinkers subconsciously have warmer feelings for the Coca-Cola brand, and that gives Coke an edge over Pepsi, even though Pepsi performs as well as Coke in blind taste tests. Brain scanning is the field's dominant technology, but other technologies and techniques are used as well, often in conjunction with FMRIs. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology that can read electrical signals pulsating from brain cells...
...there limits to neuromarketing's reach? FMRI studies are expensive. Brammer says a medium-sized study could cost between $94,000 and $188,000. Less-expensive options can also answer some marketing questions, however. For Unilever, Vienna's Walla recently used a startle-reflex method that measures muscle control of eye blinks to determine that eating ice cream makes people happier than eating yogurt or chocolate. Another drawback of scanners: lying in one is hardly a natural environment to watch TV or spot brands. But anticipated smaller versions that let subjects sit up under contraptions that resemble salon hair dryers...