Brain Sells

On a recent Wednesday night, Eleanor Phipp spent an hour watching commercial television. Nothing unusual about that — except that Phipp, 30, was in a dark room at a south London medical center, lying inside a loudly whirring Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) scanner that mapped her brain as video images flickered before her eyes. Brain scanners — which use radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to trace oxygenated blood to areas of neural activity — are mainly used to study or diagnose brain diseases. But Phipp's brain was being scrutinized for decidedly nonmedical reasons. Researchers were monitoring how it reacted to the TV pictures; specifically, the study was designed to determine whether viewers respond to ads differently at night than in the morning.

The study is being run by Neurosense, an Oxford-based consulting firm that's a leader in the fast-growing industry called neuromarketing. Neuromarketing uses the techniques and technologies of neuroscience — particularly FMRI scanners — to better understand how our brains react to advertising, brands and products, reactions that mostly occur subconsciously. This burgeoning ability to peer inside the black box of the brain to see how it processes images and messages and reaches decisions potentially gives marketeers a new tool that can be used to fine-tune ads and marketing campaigns, bolster or extend brands, or design better products. "It can give valuable information that's not particularly easy to access by other techniques," says Michael Brammer, Neurosense's chairman and co-founder. "It's no surprise that some of these bits of information are interesting commercially."

Indeed, companies as diverse as Unilever and DaimlerChrysler have used neuromarketing. Viacom Brand Solutions, the commercial arm of MTV Networks, for instance, late last year had Neurosense study how viewers digest programming and ads. It looked at nine regions of the brain that control such functions as attraction, long- and short-term memory and understanding. One counterintuitive result: commercials generated more activity in eight of those nine cortical regions than the programs did, indicating that ads do register with viewers. But programming dominated the ninth area, which controls absorption — indeed, viewers were so absorbed by the programs that the other areas were nearly dormant. More predictably, the study also found that ads work best when their content is in harmony with the programs they're interrupting. An ad for the alcopop WKD, for instance, registered more viewer interest than a Red Cross appeal when it appeared during a South Park clip.

Those kinds of results have Neurosense clients coming back for more. And new neuromarketing consultants are also cropping up across Europe — like Neuroconsult, which hung out its shingle in Vienna earlier this year and is run by Peter Walla, a neurobiologist who teaches at three schools, including Vienna University. German researcher Peter Kenning says when he did a Google Internet search on the term neuromarketing five years ago, he turned up a couple of hits; today, a similar search yields more than 200,000. FMRI technology emerged only around 15 years ago. Efforts to combine it with marketing began in the late 1990s; indeed, Neurosense was launched in 1997. The appellation neuromarketing popped up several years later, possibly coined by Ale Smidts, a marketing professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. It's essentially a subgenre of another emerging discipline, neuroeconomics. "Neuromarketing is seen as more negative," Smidts says, because of marketing's sometimes unsavory connotations.