HAUTE POP

“Mind reading marketers have ways of making you buy”, hypes New Scientist, in a characteristically excitable but vague article about neuromarketing. They say:

Take a look at the cover of this week’s New Scientist magazine [the central one of three]. Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week’s cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.

Surely you don’t need an EEG to explain why the middle cover won, though? Basic graphic design principles make it clear that it’d be the one readers would prefer:

• ‘New Scientist’ is in red, which grabs the attention (and is more likely to appeal to a male audience) better than primrose yellow
• It’s the only cover that features the main article listing on the top left below the title, a position well known the sweet spot for shoppers’ attention. This is also much easier to read than the dread centre-justify the others use.
• The main article is listed in bigger, capital letters that are again more eye-catching
• It’s the only cover advertising some kind of freebie in a little blue pull-out.

Now I’m not entirely skeptical about the entire premise of neuromarketing - it’s just only really interesting when it gives insights that other research methods can’t reveal. Brainscans are cool when they reveal differences people wouldn’t normally notice:

An international cosmetics firm tested two subtly different versions of an advert using a traditional focus group. They found that one was much preferred over the other, even though volunteers failed to notice any difference between them. This was hardly surprising as they only differed in one 4-second scene in which a female model either looked passively at the camera or touched her cheek with the back of her hand. To find out why this made such an impact, the company hired a group of neuroscientists led by Rafal Ohme of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Using EEG imaging of 45 women aged between 25 and 35, they found that the gesture produced a brief but powerful emotional uplift during the crucial scene.

(Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, vol 2, p 21).

A comment left by Prof FF Robb is also worth heeding:

In the late ’60s or early ’70s there was a great craze for testing ads, packages, slogans etc. by measuring how eye movements scanned the field and by observing the extent of iris dilation - windows to the soul? The rhetoric was almost identical. But even before that, just after WWII I dimly recollect attempts to use ‘lie detectors’ to test the sincerity of participants responses to questions about brand names, pack designs and ads. There was also a test store in Baker Street equipped with hidden cameras that watched how customers scanned supermarket shelves. Again, almost supernatural powers were claimed and many advertisers were persuaded to invest in this kind of research. If I were your advertising agent, I would caution you against spending too much on this kind of thing although it does bring the same kind of comfort to advertisers that placebos bring to hypochondriacs.