Neuromarketing washington

How Much Value Can Neuromarketing Add to Your Consumer

How Much Incremental Value?
For neuromarketing, that’s the rub – is there enough incremental value to justify the
costs for brainwave research? It’s an issue Millward Brown has been tackling for the
past 4-5 years, says Graham Page, the research firm’s executive vice president of global
solutions. Page, who runs Millward Brown’s Innovation Center, asks three questions
when weighing the benefits of neuroscience (or any other emerging technique, for that
matter):
1. Does it provide something meaningful in its context?
2. Does it tell me something I don’t already know?
3. Does it actually have behavioral consequences – in other words, is it a better predictor than
traditional methods?
So far, the answers have not convinced Page that neuroscience alone is a
game-changer for marketers. In many cases, he concludes, brainwave studies
don’t provide information beyond what marketers can already get through proven
survey-based methods. “There’s a huge amount of smoke and mirrors from some
neuromarketing companies,” says Page. Some greatly overstate what they can actually
measure. And the implications that neuroscience techniques will replace traditional forms
of consumer research, he adds, are simply not true.
Skeptics point to three barriers that could inhibit widespread use of neuroscience
methods:

1. TEST ENVIRONMENT.

Requiring subjects to wear special equipment or lie prone in an MRI chamber can raise
anxiety levels and skew brain-wave responses to the advertisements or other marketing
messages those subjects are viewing. And the specialized equipment and testing facilities
force companies to keep their sample sizes small.

2. SUBJECTIVITY.

Neuroscience results can vary tremendously from technique to technique, and from
provider to provider. In other words, the methods may be based deeply in science, but the
interpretation of results can still be quite subjective.

3. COST.

Functional MRIs (fMRIs) can cost thousands of dollars per subject, while EEGs cost in the
hundreds per subject, Gage estimates.

Executives at NeuroFocus and FKF Applied Research don’t claim that their methods are
the be-all, end-all for market research. But they are quick to defend their approaches
as cost effective, quantifiable, and statistically significant. They argue that while the
per-subject costs are higher, the total costs for a study are usually comparable to
traditional research methods, because those techniques require a much larger sample to
derive any useful insights. And even then, the metrics coming from survey-based testing
will be far more ambiguous than measurements of brainwave activity. NeuroFocus’s
Pradeep goes back to the thermometer metaphor: Traditional consumer research is like
trying to determine the temperature by asking 20 people in a room what they think the
temperature is, and then taking the average. Neuroscience, on the other hand, is the
thermometer that provides a much more accurate gauge of human behavior.–by RobORegan

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