Why Neuromarketing's Time Hasn't Come

We may be able to measure brain activity in response to marketing, but we still don't know how that translates into buying habits.

What if a company could study the neurons firing in your brain to find out how they can make you buy their products? This may sound like science fiction, but there’s been a lot of buzz around neuromarketing lately.

Untill recently, I assumed it was something that only folks doing TV ads for large companies would be interested in it. Then I sat in on a panel on neuromarketing at South By Southwest Interactive this year where I heard marketers at smaller companies talking about it too.

This, frankly, scared me. I don’t think marketers should be investing much time in neuromarketing (at least for now), particularly those at smaller companies.

Let me explain why.

The metrics that are most commonly tracked in neuromarketing are emotional engagement, attention, and memory. Anyone who has ever run a focus group will tell you that customers often can't express clearly what their purchase motivations are. Neuromarketing attempts to go directly to the subconscious to figure out how we respond to marketing with the goal of improving it.

It may seem logical that if the parts of your brain connected with engagement, attention, and memory are all firing away like crazy when you are exposed to marketing, that would mean that the marketing is good. Right? Not so fast. It turns out that all of that brain activity is one thing; motivating you to actually do something (like typing godaddy.com or buying a bag of Doritos) is another.

Take Super Bowl ads for example. For the past several years, a "neuromedia" research firm has recorded brain activity while people watched the ads and then ranked them by "neurological engagement." It turns out that engagement didn't necessarily translate into a desired behaviour. In 2008, GoDaddy's ad ranked near the bottom of the engagement chart, yet the ad generated 1.5 million hits on their site – a staggering marketing success. Here's what Roger Dooley at the Neuromarketing Blog had to say on the subject:

The truth is that at the moment, we don’t really know what all that brain activity means. That doesn’t mean the experiments are a bad idea – it just means that we need to keep working to establish a correlation between the brain effects of the advertisement and the ultimate achievement of the advertiser’s objectives.

This is an old quote (2006), but the panelists at the SXSW session this year reiterated the fact that, so far, we haven't been able to connect the dots between brain activity and behaviour in a way that marketers can use.

Don't get me wrong here – as a marketer I care about what's going on inside your head. But frankly, I only really care when it drives behaviour – in particular, buying behaviour. There are lots of important things that marketers can learn about behaviour from neuroscientists. In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely gives a host of great examples of how people behave in irrational ways with practical implications for marketers. These include:

• If there is a default option, people are more likely to pick it.
• People's preference for one product over another can be dramatically changed if presented with a third, decoy option.
• The price that a product is initially set at can anchor consumer expectations of what that product is worth.
• If there is a free option, people will pick that one.
• People ascribe a much higher value to things that they already own than they do to things they have not yet purchased.

Notice that each example is centred around behaviour and not brain activity. Because at the end of the day, that's what marketers really care about.

Neuromarketing, although interesting, is not something that marketers can use in a practical way today. Some day in the future, our brain activity may tell us something about how we decide to purchase things, but until it does marketers shouldn’t worry their precious neurons thinking about it.

A form of this article originally appeared here. For more from April Dunford, check out her blog, Rocket Watcher: Product Marketing for Startups.