Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business (Dan Ariely and Gregory S.Berns 2010 Nature Reviews) Anna Jo April 12 th 2010
Oct 22, 2014
Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business
(Dan Ariely and Gregory S.Berns 2010 Nature Reviews)
Anna JoApril 12th 2010
To reveal hidden
information that is not
apparent in other
approaches
To provide a more efficient cost-benefit
trade-off than other
marketing research
approaches
To provide early
information about product
design
3 fundamental Question
Neuromarketing
Business
Neuroimaging
Why use brain imaging for marketing?
Selected marketing research approaches
Focus group Preference questionnaires
Simulated choice methods
Market tests
What is measured Open-ended answers, body language and behaviour; not
suitable for statistical analysis
Importanceweighting for
various product attributes
Choices amongproducts
Decision to buy and choice among
products
Cost and competitive risk
Low cost; risk comes only from misuses of data
by the seller
Moderate cost and some risk of
alerting competitors
Moderatecost(higher if
using prototypes instead of
descriptions) and some risk of
alerting competitors
High cost and high risk of
alerting competitors, plus
the risk of the product being
reverse engineered before
launch
Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Preference measurement
Reverse inference & Reward fMRI as a brain recorder
Willingness to Pay(WTP)
mOFC
PFC
fMRI(BOLD
activity)
Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Preference measurement
Reverse inference & Reward fMRI as a brain recorder
• Striatal activity correlates with hedonic rating scales
=> Ventral striatal activity as an indication that an individual likes something
• Evidence: the posterior probability for a reward process given the observation of nucleus
accumbens(NAc) activation(Prior probability of engaging a reward-related process : 0.5)
=> Based on the number of fMRI papers reported in the BrainMap database with and
without ‘reward’ and with and without Nac activation
=> Nac activation increases the probability of a reward-related processes taking place to
0.9( Bayes factor 9 -> strong evidence for a causal relationship)
• In real world setting, individual likes something based on Nac activation alone may be
substantially less.
=> Product likeability: significant correlation between Nac activity and product preferences
in college students(Knutson et al.)
Goal-directed action / a read-out of ‘liking’
LearningOutcome evaluation
action selection
assignment of value to
differenet actions
Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Preference measurement
Reverse inference & Reward fMRI as a brain recorder
representation of the decisions
Value-based decision-making process
OFC,StriatalActivity
key role in physiological arousal, aversive in nature / a disgust-meter Insula
Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Preference measurement
Reverse inference & Reward fMRI as a brain recorder
• Advantage: activation in a particular brain region of interest is measured
• MVPA has the statistical power to predict the individual choices of a subject.
• For real-world marketing applications, it may be more important to predict future behaviour
than to understand the ‘why’ of behavior
Multi-voxel Pattern Analysis(MVPA)
Costs and Benefits
Culture and Advertising
• BOLD responses are influenced by ‘expectation’ effects(Pricing effects)
• mOFC responses were higher when subjects were told that the wine was expensive vs.
inexpensive
=> Activity in this region correlated with self-report ratings of how much participants liked the
wine(actually all wines were actually same)
=> the instantaneous experience of pleasure from a product(Experienced utility) is
influenced by pricing and mediating by the mOFC
• Subjects expectation=> striatal response
• The reward related signals in the ventral striatum and Nac can be more accurately linked
to prediction errors for reward than to reward itself.
ExpectationEffect
The role of expectation
Costs and Benefits
The role of expectation Culture and Advertising
• Coke drinkers showed significant activation in the hippocampus and right dorsolateral PFC
when they were cued about the upcoming drink of Coke
• “reverse inference constraint” : Compared brain responses to persons and brands,
activation patterns for brands differed from those for people
=> brands are not perceived in the same way as people.
• People base many decisions on socio-cultural rules and identities
Early Product Design
Political candidates• 2008 US Presidential
race: $ 1.6 billion• response to statement
about candidates => vm PFC, the anterior cingulate cortex, the posterior cingulatecortex and the insula
Food products• perception of flavour -> a multisensory integration process • OFC: perceived pleasantness• Insula: viscosity and fat contentCf> Drawback: super-heroin of food
Architecture• Virtual reality => automobile driving• Hippocampal load: when the
subject makes navigation decisions but not when they are externally cued
Entertainment• Film => cognitive
synchronizer• Recall: the strength
of hippocampal and temporal lobe
• Editing process => to release the most profitable movie.
Product Development Cycle
Conclusion and Future direction
1. Hype: Neuroimaging will be more cost-effective than traditional marketing tool
2. MVPA is able to reveal consumer preferences => to boost post-design sales efforts
3. Neuromarketing
1) to coerce the public into consuming products that they neither need nor want
2) to identify new and exciting products that people want and find useful =>”user design”
4. Hope: to foster a more human-compatible design of the products around us