fMRI

Every year, consumers spend more time using digital devices. Every year, more media is consumed digitally. Naturally, advertising dollars are increasingly flowing to digital as well. But, don’t pull the plug on that direct mail campaign just yet. New research has again shown that content on paper affects our brains in different and more powerful ways.

Every neuromarketing technique has one main purpose: get beneath consumers’ conscious reactions and see what they think subconsciously. While some neuromarketers employ high tech equipment like fMRI machines, a Canadian group says a simple device first used in 1890 may unlock our brain’s secrets. A team from the University of British Columbia’s Visual Cognition Lab thinks that, used properly, the Ouija Board can show what subjects are really thinking.

Lots of us say we love our favorite products. We love our Droid. We love our iPad. We love our comfy sweater. We love our bank. (Well, banks and airlines might feel the love a little less these days.) Last week, Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed and Buyology, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that described his use of fMRI brain scans of subjects exposed to iPhone sounds and video.

Targeting Boomers or seniors with your advertising? Keep it simple. While that’s usually good advice for any kind of advertising, brain scans show a dramatic difference in the ability of older brains to suppress distracting information. Studies by Dr. Adam Gazzaley (then at UC Berkeley, now at UC San Francisco) found the suppression difference in older vs. younger brains was the key factor in memory formation decline in older people.

In a fascinating study just published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers have shown that we make buying decisions even when we aren’t paying attention to the products, and that fMRI observation of brain activity can predict these decisions. This new work builds on previous research by Stanford’s Knutson and CMU’s Loewenstein which showed that purchase decisions could be predicted when subjects were shown explicit offers. Here’s the abstract:

Brain scans using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) don’t always get a lot of respect. They have been accused of being used to produce research that is colorful but not particularly insightful. One study used fMRI to find activity in the brains of dead salmon (Are Brain Scan Findings Fishy?).

Browse through the magazines at the supermarket checkout line, and you’ll find that almost every one oriented to a female audience has some kind of a weight loss plan on the cover. Male-oriented magazines, meanwhile, are more likely to show an attractive woman instead of a guy showing off the results of his three-week miracle diet. While one might attribute the glut of diet articles to the overall rate of obesity in the U.S., new research shows that the magazine editors may be exploiting body image concerns that are “hardwired” into the brains of all women.

Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs, with food being at the most basic level of biological need and shelter one step above as part of a “safety” need. He may have been on the right track, according to new research led by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University. The researchers exposed subjects to a series of nouns while monitoring their brain activity in an fMRI machine, and recorded which areas of the subjects brain were activated by each noun.

Some neuroscientists have long been critical of fMRI brain scans, complaining that the technique’s colorful images may cause their data to be weighted beyond their merit. Now, two skeptical groups have published data suggesting that the way we interpret brain scans is downright fishy.

by: Roger Dooley

Robert Burton of Salon wrote an interesting piece that discusses both the field of prescription drug marketing and how fMRI brain scans have been used to show that pain is “real.”