25 years ago Wu-Tang taught us what C.R.E.A.M. stands for, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”. Today, it’s Consumerism Rules Everything Around Me. We are all consumers, living in a consumer world, without knowing the psychological impact of consumer behavior. Enter neuromarketing. What is neuromarketing? The study of how the brain is influenced by marketing and consumerism.

On the surface, neuro-marketing combines neuroscience and marketing. Peel back a layer and it goes much further than marketing. Neuromarketing is a study of the brain on brands. For brands, neuromarketing provides a psychological lens to understand consumer behavior. For us consumers, it provides a view into our inner selves as seen through our purchases. 

Take Netflix’s Black Mirror movie titled Bandersnatch, for example. The movie allows viewers to pick how the story ends by letting them decide what the protagonist, Stefan, should do at particular points in the movie. Should he go home early or stay at a party to do drugs? Should he back down from an argument or assault the other party with a nearby object?

While you were absently Netflix-n-chilling and clicking away as a viewer, Netflix was logging, categorizing, parsing and psycho-analyzing your decisions in the movie. This is just one of the countless ways in which companies create a psychological profile of consumers.

Digital products, movies, video games, books, and social media posts give us away every day. What we consume reveals the private depths of our psychology to brands while we hum along completely unaware.

Bandersnatch is just the beginning. The rabbit hole goes much deeper.

Unknown Factors Constantly Influence Our Behavior

Here’s the thing, we are bad at knowing why we do what we do. We think we know but the reality is, we are poor judges of whether or not our brains have registered something to begin with. And the smallest, most random variable in our environment can have a massive impact on our psychology. Here’s a case to illustrate the point:

Imagine the following scenario happening to a friend of yours, let’s call her Jill.

Jill responds to an ad at her university and signs up for an experiment paying $20 to evaluate faces. She arrives a little late because someone bumped her into the hallway but is relieved to find the experimenter is friendly and understanding. He sits her down at an empty white table and gets her started on the experiment. 

It’s refreshingly straightforward. She’s given a person’s headshot and provides her best guess at a few simple questions about them - how friendly she thinks they are, how generous, attractive, etc. No right or wrong answers, just her best guess. After a few rounds of face judgements, she fills out a brief questionnaire at the end with her name, age, gender, etc. Easy peasy.

That is until she gets to the final question: Why did you rate this person the way you did? 

“What do you mean, why?” Jill thinks, “Because that’s what I felt when I saw their photo, what else is there?” 

It turns out, the clumsy person (let’s call him Jack), who bumped into her in the hallway was part of the experiment. It was an ingeniously elaborate set up devised by researchers at UC Boulder and eventually published in Science. When Jack dropped his papers, he handed Jill a cup of coffee to hold while he recovered the papers. The researchers gave half the participants a cold cup of coffee and the other half a warm cup to hold for less than a minute.

The participants who received the warm cup rated people in photographs as being much more generous, friendly, and attractive than those who were given the cold cup. And the most consistent finding of all? Exactly zero participants made any connection between their positive feelings to the temperature of the coffee they held.

The implication here can’t be understated - a random factor like the temperature of coffee can determine how attractive, pleasant, generous and friendly you find someone.

This study is a perfect illustration of our lives at every moment. Random factors influence us in profound ways. And even more, we’re notoriously bad at understanding if and how these things influence us. Imagine - we’re this bad at realizing why we find a picture attractive, how much worse are we at understanding why we find a brand attractive? 

Using a tool called fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), researchers can take this a step further by eavesdropping on the brain directly. fMRI studies provide a glimpse of some of these factors which escape our awareness. These studies have found that much of the effects of branding and marketing happen without our realization. Even when we aren’t paying attention to a logo or a product, the brain is registering important information about it and influencing our preferences.

Branding is all around us. However, we rarely understand its impact, nor do we catch how it influences our brain. This is neuromarketing where brain meets brand. 

In the case of evaluating pictures, it’s a safe, no-stakes environment. No one is trying to get you to respond in any specific way and it makes no difference how you rate the faces. At the end of the experiment, you’ll get your $20 and a nice thank you from the experimenter.

The consumer world is not quite so nice and neutral. Brands are enterprises of persuasion. In many ways, it isn’t brand meets brain but instead, brand against brain.

The Knowledge Gap is Real

As it stands right now, brands know this neuromarketing terrain better than you do. And not just about neuroscience in general but about your brain specifically. The big data cat is out of the bag. With each swipe, click, and purchase, the amount of data on you grows and a brand’s model of your brain becomes ever more accurate.

This trend will increase. As more and more data accumulates, brands will only get better at psychological persuasion.

Brands aren’t evil by nature, they simply know more about consumer psychology than, well, consumers. The knowledge gap them (brands) and us (consumers) is frighteningly vast. Brands know us better than we know ourselves. This has to change. If we want to have a balanced relationship with consumption, this must change.

This blog is written for the consumer to even the score, to bridge the knowledge gap and to bring consumer psychology to the masses. The authors are two professors, one neuroscientist and one marketer, who strive to merge their two worlds and connect the unexpected dots between our brains, brands, and our behavior.

How brands impact your brain is as vast and complex as the brain itself. This journey touches intimate aspects of our inner lives - from emotion to logic, experience to memory and nostalgia, decision making to addiction, sensation to perception, sociality, morality, identity and so much more. Neuromarketing is the field dedicated to understanding these deep interactions and learning how our external world affects our internal world.

This blog is about exploring this relationship at the deepest level for the benefit of the consumer. Join us and get this C.R.E.A.M.!

What’s Next?

References

Knutson B, Rick S, Wimmer GE, Prelec D, Loewenstein G (2007) Neural predictors of purchases. Neuron 53:147–156

Tusche, A Bode, S and Haynes, J (2000). Neural Responses to Unattended Products Predict Later Consumer Choices. The Journal of Neuroscience, 30(23):8024 – 8031

Williams, L. E. & Bargh, J. A. (2008a) Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science 322:606–607