Neuromarketing uses neuroimaging to answer 3 questions for businesses: reveal hidden information about consumer preferences, provide more cost-effective marketing research than traditional methods, and give early feedback during product design. It measures brain activity and uses techniques like fMRI, MVPA, and reverse inference to study regions involved in reward, preference, and decision-making. While it could help design desirable products, there are also concerns it could manipulate consumers or reveal sensitive information to competitors.

1. Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of
neuroimaging in business
(Dan Ariely and Gregory S.Berns 2010 Nature Reviews)
Anna Jo
April 12th 2010

2. Why use brain imaging for marketing?
Neuromarketing
3 fundamental Question
To reveal To provide a To provide
hidden more efficient early
information cost-benefit information
that is not trade-off than about product
apparent in other design
other marketing
approaches research
approaches
Business
Neuroimaging

3. Selected marketing research approaches
Focus group Preference Simulated choice Market tests
questionnaires methods
What is measured Open-ended Importance Choices among Decision to buy
answers, body weighting for products and choice among
language and various product products
behaviour; not attributes
suitable for
statistical analysis
Cost and Low cost; risk Moderate cost Moderate High cost and
competitive risk comes only from and some risk of cost(higher if high risk of
misuses of data alerting using prototypes alerting
by the seller competitors instead of competitors, plus
descriptions) and the risk of the
some risk of product being
alerting reverse
competitors engineered before
launch

4. Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Reverse inference &
fMRI as a brain recorder
Preference measurement Reward
mOFC
Willingness fMRI
to Pay (BOLD
(WTP) activity)
PFC

5. Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Reverse inference &
fMRI as a brain recorder
Preference measurement Reward
• 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.)

6. Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Reverse inference &
fMRI as a brain recorder
Preference measurement Reward
Value-based decision-
making process
assignment
representation of action Outcome
of value to Learning
the decisions selection evaluation
differenet actions
OFC,
Striatal Goal-directed action / a read-out of ‘liking’
Activity
Insula key role in physiological arousal, aversive in nature / a disgust-meter

7. Revealing hidden information
Brain activity & Reverse inference &
fMRI as a brain recorder
Preference measurement Reward
Multi-voxel Pattern
Analysis(MVPA)
• 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

8. Costs and Benefits
The role of expectation Culture and Advertising
Expectation
Effect
• 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.

9. 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

10. Early Product Design
Food products
• perception of flavour ->
a multisensory integration process
• OFC: perceived pleasantness
• Insula: viscosity and fat content
Cf> Drawback: super-heroin of food
Political candidates Entertainment
• 2008 US Presidential • Film => cognitive
race: $ 1.6 billion synchronizer
• response to statement Product Development • Recall: the strength
about candidates => of hippocampal and
vm PFC, the anterior Cycle temporal lobe
cingulate cortex, the • Editing process =>
posterior cingulate to release the most
cortex and the insula profitable movie.
Architecture
• Virtual reality => automobile driving
• Hippocampal load: when the
subject makes navigation decisions
but not when they are externally
cued

12. 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