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Brain scans may help marketers find what's hot

Posted on: Thursday, 11 March 2004, 06:00 CST

At a brain-imaging lab in Pasadena, a dozen volunteers lay down one after another inside a banging, clanging magnetic scanner to watch movie trailers.

As the two-minute clips unfolded, Caltech professor Steven Quartz and two technicians examined the viewers' brains.

Which film clips best activated areas that indicate memories are being encoded, hinting that this is a trailer people will remember?

Which movie previews made the biggest splash in parts of the brain associated with anticipation of pleasure, suggesting how eagerly this film might be awaited?

Quartz and a Los Angeles marketing company are putting the final touches on a brain scanning service that will be offered to film studios this spring to help them evaluate which trailers might attract the most moviegoers.

'Neuromarketing' is born

This is "neuromarketing" -- the emerging field of studying the brain to help advertisers tap into people's unarticulated needs, drives and desires.

It is a field whose existence is one of the most vivid displays of how quickly understanding of the human brain is evolving with the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

Physicians and psychologists, philosophers and economists all have become fascinated by activity that can be mapped in the brain as volunteers placed within scanners undergo stress; look at beautiful faces; are trusted or betrayed in economic games; or taste squirts of Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Scanning centers are cropping up or expanding at more universities.

Researchers are still refining their understanding of how much these snapshots of the brain at work can reveal about human actions and emotions. No one can look at a brain scan and tell what someone is thinking. But knowledge of how the brain goes about its thinking has grown vastly since the development of fMRIs a decade ago.

"It's pretty darn stunning how far we've come," said Read Montague, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he directs the human neuroimaging lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Using an ultra-powerful magnet, fMRIs track oxygen-rich and oxygen-depleted hemoglobin molecules in the brain, giving researchers a moment-by-moment portrait of where blood is flowing, and by inference, where large groups of nerve cells are active.

Science meets consumerism

Amid this exploration attention has also turned, perhaps inevitably, to one of the most fundamental activities in American culture -- buying.

From there, it is a quick and easy leap to both neuromarketing and the consumer group trying to eradicate it.

Both have become active well before anyone can provably say that neuromarketing delivers the goods any better than more conventional research into consumer behavior.

The quest for deeper understanding of what makes us buy entrances businesses, because traditional market research has well-known flaws.

A single, strong personality can dominate a focus group, distorting reactions. People lie to pollsters. Even those who want to be completely open about what they prefer, and why, may not know - - unable to penetrate the complex brew of thoughts, emotions and instincts that shapes their desires.

As hard as merchandisers try to fathom customers, behavior remains so difficult for businesses to predict that "from their point of view, consumers are like some kind of random, finicky cat," said Colin Camerer, a professor of business economics at the California Institute of Technology.

"Neuromarketing is kind of like interviewing the brain," he said. "Instead of just asking people what they want, you go right to the brain process."

That is a chilling prospect to some of the ad industry's biggest critics.

Voices of dissent

A group called Commercial Alert, which campaigns against everything from brand names on sports stadiums to junk food in schools, has tried to shut down neuromarketing research at Emory University in Atlanta.

"Any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising can cause tremendous disease, death and human suffering," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of the group he co-founded with Ralph Nader.

Ruskin doesn't want it to be any easier to push unhealthy products that could contribute to obesity, alcoholism or violence. He doesn't want children to become more vulnerable advertising targets.

Those doing the work disagree say they've addressed ethical issues by following standard research practices -- working with willing volunteers, full disclosure and a technology that does not harm the subject.

They understand the anxiety, though.

"This starts to touch on the part of our social selves that we most treasure. People are going to get sparky about it," said Montague, who is organizing an April neuromarketing conference that will cover issues such as product development and brand identity.

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