You are not your brain scans!
Nielsen provide analysis and insight on a whole range of mediums, from government polls, tv shows, to eCommerce and when it comes to marketing [insert product here] you pay these guys the big bucks and they tell you what your customers want, where you can reach them, how to pitch the idea, how to track the before and after your multi-million dollar marketing campaign and so and so forth. And, who’s to know their data is right or wrong or whether the insights they provide clearly reflects market conditions? Well, up until recently nobody really knew, but changes to their @Plan service have people asking that very question. Here’s the link.
Even with these occasional data anomalies, which in fairness can be expected, insights gleamed from companies like Nielsen are big business, and something I’ll be blogging more about later.
Here’s something new and a little different in the field of market and industry analysis. It’s called Neuromarketing and here’s a company, Neurofocus, that specialises in it. Plug from their site:
Neuroscience provides a deep, clear view into the real-world, real-time reactions of consumers at the most elemental level: their brainwaves.
Never heard of Neuromarketing? This is from wikipedia:
Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.
Marketing analysts will use neuromarketing to better measure a consumer’s preference, as the verbal response given to the question, “Do you like this product?” may not always be the true answer due to cognitive bias. This knowledge will help marketers create products and services designed more effectively and marketing campaigns focused more on the brain’s response. This makes neuromarketing and its applied results potentially subliminal.
Neuromarketing will tell the marketer what the consumer reacts to, whether it was the color of the packaging, the sound the box makes when shaken, or the idea that they will have something their co-consumers do not.
If you’re wondering whether this could possibly be the future of consumer/market analysis, then take into consideration that Nielsen made a “strategic investment” in Neurofocus last year.
But there are always two sides to the story, and to provide a balanced view on the subject of Neuromarketing, watch this video. It’s Natasha Mitchell from ABC’s All in the Mind. She’s one of my fav podcast presenters and in this video she provides a very informative and entertaining view point on MRI’s titled: You are not your brain scan!
Video: You are not your brain scan!
