February 7th, 2004
Brain Research Tapped to Tell What Buyers like Scientists, Sellers Exploring Together
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
Sacramento Bee
At a brain-imaging lab in Pasadena last week, a dozen volunteers lay down one
after another inside a banging, clanging magnetic scanner to watch movie trailers.
As the two-minute clips unfolded, Caltech Professor Steven Quartz and two technicians
examined the viewers’ brains.
They wanted to see which film clips best activated areas that indicate memories
are being encoded, hinting at which trailers people will remember. They also
wanted to know which movie previews made the biggest splash in parts of the
brain associated with anticipation of pleasure, suggesting how eagerly certain
films might be awaited.
Quartz and a Los Angeles marketing company are putting the final touches on
a brain-scanning service that will be offered to film studios this spring to
help them evaluate which trailers might attract the most moviegoers.
This is "neuromarketing"—the emerging field of studying the brain
to help advertisers tap into people’s unarticulated needs, drives and desires.
The field is one of the most vivid displays of how quickly understanding of
the human brain is evolving with the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging,
or fMRI.
Physicians and psychologists, philosophers and economists all have been fascinated
by activity that can be mapped in the brain.
UC DAVIS ACTIVE IN FIELD
Scanning centers are cropping up or expanding at more universities, among them
the University of California at Davis.
Researchers still are refining their understanding of how much these snapshots
of the brain at work can reveal about human actions and emotions. No one can
look at a brain scan and tell what someone is thinking. But knowledge of how
the brain goes about its thinking has grown vastly since the development of
fMRIs a decade ago.
"It’s pretty darn stunning how far we’ve come," said Read Montague,
a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he directs the human
neuroimaging lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
Using an ultrapowerful magnet, fMRIs track oxygen-rich and oxygen-depleted
hemoglobin molecules in the brain, giving researchers a moment-by-moment portrait
of where blood is flowing, and by inference, where large groups of nerve cells
are active.
Doctors believe the scans will help them better understand addictive behavior
and mental disorders. Other researchers expect brain imaging to offer
insights into the physical processes underlying love and bonding, punishment
and reward, happiness and decision-making.
Amid this exploration, attention has also turned to one of the most fundamental
activities in American culture—buying.
From there, it is a quick and easy leap to neuromarketing and the consumer
group trying to eradicate it.
Both have become active well before anyone can provably say that neuromarketing
delivers the goods any better than more conventional research into consumer
behavior.
As hard as merchandisers try to fathom customers, behavior remains so hard
for businesses to predict that, "from their point of view, consumers are
like some kind of random, finicky cat," said Colin Camerer, a professor
of business economics at the California Institute of Technology.
"Neuromarketing is kind of like interviewing the brain," he said.
"Instead of just asking people what they want, you go right to the brain
process."
A group called Commercial Alert, which campaigns against everything from brand
names on sports stadiums to junk food in schools, has tried to shut down neuromarketing
research at Emory University in Atlanta.
AD POWER WORRISOME
"Any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising can cause tremendous
disease, death and human suffering," said Gary Ruskin, executive director
of the group he co-founded with Ralph Nader. Ruskin doesn’t want it to be any
easier to push unhealthy products that could contribute to obesity, alcoholism
or violence. He doesn’t want children to become more vulnerable advertising
targets.
Those doing the work say they’ve addressed ethical issues by following standard
research practices—working with willing volunteers, full disclosure and a
technology that does not harm the subject.
They understand the anxiety, though. "This starts to touch on the part
of our social selves that we most treasure. People are going to get sparky about
it," said Montague. Rather than trying to limit research into the brain’s
role in human behavior, he said, we need to engage in serious debate about how
the findings should be used. That debate will go far beyond advertising.
"I could imagine pollsters using this" and politicians, said Brian
Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist studying anticipation of pleasure.
Montague suggests that lawmakers someday may have to decide whether businesses
should be allowed to use brain scans in job screening. And what about neural
profiling? Could the technology, which already is shedding more light on risk-taking
behavior and impulse control, one day identify potential criminals before they
act?
Questions like these presume knowledge that, so far, we do not have, the nation’s
leading brain researchers agree.
"We’ll never find this ‘buy button,’" some spot in the brain that
lights up when a customer is ready to spend money, said Clint Kilts, the Emory
neuroscientist targeted by Commercial Alert. "We’re not that good, to be
perfectly honest."
But if you can sell more mousetraps because you know what people want in a
mousetrap, isn’t that just as good?
Neuromarketers say no. Commercial Alert says yes.