inside your brain-Neuromarketing

[jugoso]

Traditional market research has always tried to analyze how consumers think and feel about a product or a brand, using focus groups and surveys. The problem is, sometimes consumers don't tell the truth. "In focus groups, what often happens is that you get people skewing their answer to what they think the marketer wants to hear or what will make them sound better in front of the other participants," Lucaci says.

But what if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level? The theory is that consumer motivation starts there, with a series of brain chemical triggers rooted in primal neural circuits that evolved to help humans make decisions that would help or hinder survival. Assuming consumer choice is not purely rational, but rather is strongly biased by emotion, neuromarketers believe that if they can read pleasure or disinterest at this unconscious level, they can better predict what consumers will buy or avoid.

"Of course you can influence the brain," said Ruth Lanius, a neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario, in an interview. "I think it's interesting, how can we influence the brain at an implicit level, to get you more interested in something."

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...omarketing.html

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Edited January 1, 2013 by jugoso

[Ashotep]

Trying to figure out how to sell us more garbage.

Imagine that telling a little lie so's not to cut down their product, often wondered how some things end up on the market.

[Ultima Weapon]

What scares me is how they plan to influence the brain in an attempt to "get you more interested in something." Sounds a bit like subliminal messaging to me.

[Beany]

Or subliminal massaging! I accord marketers about the same respect that I do attorneys, maybe less, because they seem to have no conscience at all.

[libstaK]

Oh lovely, so they now want to cut to the chase and study our individual material attachments, with the hope that they can create further material attachments - way to devolve the human being into a greedy consumer. Completely rancid and unethical

[HDesiato]

From the article, Lucaci says:

"It's not any more dangerous than running a survey and asking people what they think and pressing a button to pick what product they like," she said. "This time, though, we’re seeing the reaction without having to ask them anything. It’s a lot cleaner in that regard."

"It's literally impossible to design a super ad that will make people want to buy something they don't want to buy. The brain simply doesn't work like that."

In the last few years, I've noticed the prefix ; "neuro", attached to all sorts of things and it makes me question the significance of how we are influenced to pay more heed to a word if it sounds "sciency".

I'm more irritated by the advertising method of employing surealist imagery to promote their product.

Our dreams have been co-opted long ago with commercials utilizing the visual vocabulary of irrational thoughts.

Edited January 2, 2013 by HDesiato

[jugoso]

I accord marketers about the same respect that I do attorneys, maybe less, because they seem to have no conscience at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Edited January 2, 2013 by jugoso

[jugoso]

Ancient systems in the brain drive human cravings

The neurotransmitter dopamine does its work through a form of unconscious learning

Today's technology allows scientists to put living, breathing humans into an magnetic resonance imaging machine, tell them to think about something, and watch as the biological traces of thought appear and disappear in colorful bursts, measured by changes in blood oxygen levels. It means scientists can now explore the neural landscape in real time, and chart the cognitive forces that have shaped our species from our earliest days.

As they investigate this neural wonderland, scientists are probing the very essence of what makes us human. It's as though they are lifting the hood of humanity, and tinkering with the wiring to find how what makes us do what we do. And they are discovering that the secret to everything we do, think, or feel, is in that wiring, a constantly changing network of neuronal connections sculpted by evolution and fired by electrical and chemical interactions.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/12/21/inside-your-brain-new-world.html

Yeah.....so they can figure out how to influence our behaviour and sell us more crap.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/12/21/inside-your-brain-new-world.html

It seems that Dopamine is the key to influencing behaviour:

From Article:

"When dopamine neurons are activated, whatever's being encountered at the time gets a stronger ability to attract in the future," Beninger says. "So for an animal in the wild, food-related stimuli, things that signal food, like a particular place, a particular object, then acquire the ability to draw the animal in the future."

Dopamine does its work through a form of unconscious learning, teaching the brain to recognize environmental cues, sights sounds, smells, feelings that lead back to the thing that first excited the reward pathway, even if that 'thing' is dangerous. "So drugs that are abused by people, all of them activate the dopamine system," Beninger explains