Trying to get into the minds of consumers

The announcement of the findings in November prompted much excitement in marketing circles and raised an intriguing question: Was brain science about to change the face of marketing?

For many years, scientists investigating the workings of the human brain had to content themselves with studying victims of brain damage and disease, or conducted laboratory experiments in areas such as attention, perception, memory and learning.

But recently, thanks to new technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, which takes "pictures" of the brain at work on various tasks, neuroscience has been advancing apace.

Marketers are intrigued by many of its findings. One is that brain activity for an action seems to begin about half a second before a person decides to take the action -- suggesting that we are not so much "making" the decision as simply becoming aware of the fact that a decision has been made.

If people are not aware of their own decision-making processes, how can marketers best influence them? Our brains routinely recognize signals from our environment, including advertisements, that we have no awareness of ever seeing. What does this tell us about how to improve advertising effectiveness?

In 2002, Adam Koval, a senior executive at Atlanta-based Brighthouse Neurostrategies Group -- a consultancy specializing in applications of brain research -- attracted interest from marketers when he announced that, thanks to the techniques of neuroscience, corporations would soon be "getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave." In reality, such dreams remain far from fruition.

Neuro-marketing insights are influencing marketing practice at the edges. Weapon 7, a British marketing agency, is advising its clients on how to place visual images in advertisements so that the message survives the fast-forwarding process by registering in the brain subconsciously.

PHD, a media buying arm of the U.S. marketing services conglomerate Omnicom Group, uses a process called "neuro-planning" to give different weights to different media in marketing campaigns depending on what the brand is trying to achieve and how each media affects the brain: sight only, sound only, moving images plus sound and so on.