My heart belongs to Philly. Not the American city but the cream cheese. Every time I see a picture of the the little plastic tub, with its familiar silver foil cover and blue lettering, my brain goes into a spin.
This peculiar news was broken to me by Dr Larry Farwell, a scientist who glued electrodes to my scalp and recorded my brain waves while I looked at advertisements for various types of cream cheese. “What your brain waves show is that you have a response to Philadelphia,” says Farwell, who runs an Iowa-based company called Brain Wave Science. If you’re a scientist, you’ll want to know that my “response” amounted to a spike in a particular brain wave known as the P300 mermer (memory and encoding related multifaceted electro-encephalographic response), which can be interpreted as my brain recognising the brand.
If you’re a marketer, however, you need only know this: the spike represents an absolute goldmine. Brand recognition is the first step in a process that should end with a shopper chucking the product into her trolley. Instead of simply guessing whether a million-pound advertising campaign is “connecting” with consumers, the spike reveals the connecting process as it happens. What is more, this response is immediate (taking less than a second) and involuntary. You can’t fake a spike, you can’t hide it and you can’t moderate it. It is no wonder that the billion-dollar advertising business has seized upon neuromarketing - the study of the brain while exposed to marketing messages — as the way of the future. It provides an objective way of measuring — although not understanding why — which brands featured in the 1,500 adverts seen by the average person each day get remembered.
This nascent field, which has mostly involved consumers undergoing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans while perusing adverts, has also attracted the concerned gaze of libertarians, who regard the direct tapping of consumers’ brains as faintly Orwellian. While the Centre for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, an American think-tank that campaigns for freedom of thought, does not object to neuromarketing per se (provided that consumers have consented to having their brains probed), it says that products developed through neuromarketing should carry a declaration on the packaging.
The CCLE also argues that it is unethical to use neuromarketing on children’s products, or to use it to probe political affiliation (a “neuropoll” during the last American presidential election found that scenes of 9/11 activated the “fear” button more strongly in the brains of Democrats than in the brains of Republicans).
Neuromarketing is virgin territory for Dr Farwell, too. A neuroscientist, a decade ago he discovered that brain waves could be used to examine a person’s memory or knowledge. In early validation tests, volunteers shown a series of seven-digit numbers produced only the P300 response, or spike, when confronted with their telephone number. The crime-busting potential of his discovery quickly became apparent. Since spikes in the P300 mermer signal imply that the brain recognises something, he reasoned that suspects could be hoisted by their own neurological petard. Serve up a fact that only the murderer would know — and scan for the spike.
While the technique — Farwell, who has patented it, calls it brain fingerprinting — cannot be used as the sole evidence to convict someone, it is admissible in court. It has been pivotal in nailing one killer (he later confessed to multiple murders). It has also been used to win appeals against convictions and to haul a convict off Death Row.
Farwell knows that accessing brain waves is a highly controversial business. “Brain fingerprinting answers a scientific question, not a legal one, which is simply this: ‘Is certain information stored in the brain?’,” Farwell says. “And there is no dispute on this — if a person knows that information, he’ll produce the P300 response. But I would never stride into court and say, ‘Here’s your murderer’ any more than a DNA scientist would.”
While neuromarketing isn’t quite the ethical minefield that the brain fingerprinting of criminals is, it is still going to throw up dilemmas. Consumers must obviously consent to being scanned. But measuring brain waves may eventually result in knowledge of how to manipulate them. Imagine, for example, a confectionery company testing out different advertising messages for a new chocolate bar, to see which one elicited the biggest spike in childrens’ brains.
Commercial Alert, a non-profit organisation in America that campaigns for strict rules on advertising, has long been an enemy of neuromarketing. It threatened lawsuits against early pioneers such as the Atlanta-based BrightHouse Neurostrategies and lobbied, vainly, for the American Psychological Association to speak out against the practice.
I ask Farwell whether he would consider sharing his expertise with the tobacco industry or fast-food empires. No to tobacco, he says, but yes to burgers. Advertising, he says, “should be about educating the consumer to the genuine benefits of the product”; when I aver that burgers offer no genuine benefit, beyond the fleeting sensory pleasure of consuming them, and are thought to be contributing to childhood obesity, he falls back on the “freedom of choice” defence.
Farwell says: “I thought long and hard about getting involved in the advertising field at all. But I believe in an educated consumer capable of making intelligent choices. If I genuinely thought this was about manipulating people into making decisions that are not good for them, I would not have got involved.” Conning consumers, he says, into buying something rotten simply antagonises them, and doesn’t make long-term sense (because aggrieved buyers don’t return).
Probing a consumer’s thoughts is a fiddly business. I head to Millward Brown, a market research consultancy based in West London, which has employed the services of Farwell’s company. Millward Brown’s website reveals its mission to “continue to push the boundaries of marketing research and brand consulting”. Today, it is pushing those boundaries on behalf of the Newspaper Marketing Agency.
The NMA bills itself as an independent body, funded by national newspapers (including I), committed to publicising the power of newspapers as an advertising medium. It has commissioned Millward Brown to investigate whether combined newspaper-and-TV campaigns have a bigger impact on consumers than either medium in isolation (this seems common sense to me, but I won’t knock the principle of trying to underpin an instinct by hard research). Millward Brown contacted Farwell. “A corollary of that is that there’s a high value to adding a newspaper element to an existing TV campaign,” Farwell explains. Proving this will obviously be in the interests of the NMA and newspapers. Over a couple of weeks, 250 consumers will have their brain waves scanned to this end; the hope is that TV-plus-newspaper campaigns produce bigger spikes than single-medium campaigns.
Maureen Duffy, chief executive of the NMA, is convinced that Brain Wave Science is going to be able to reach parts of the consumer psyche that other forms of advertising research can’t. She says: “Quite simply, most advertising research relies upon consumers being able to tell us what they recognise and to then articulate what response they had to the ads and ultimately to the brand. This can be challenging. Only by getting inside the minds of consumers in a rigorous manner can we really achieve this.” Consumers don’t always know why they buy a brand, and even if they do, they don’t always want to reveal it.
To become a guinea-pig, I first lose my name but gain a number: 1885. I spend ten minutes in a quiet room scanning some newspapers (I am told to read them in exactly the same way I would normally) and then a few minutes watching a clip of Coronation Street, followed by an ad break. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t consciously noticed any press adverts (being a newspaper professional, Farwell thinks, I probably pay less attention to ads than most readers); the only telly advert I can recall is for a lawn-feeding chemical.
Next, I enter a bigger room and relax into a Mastermind-style black chair in front of a blank screen. A latex-gloved assistant smears gel on my scalp and around my ears before affixing electrodes. These electrodes — round, plaster-sized pads with wires attached — connect me to a laptop. Nothing will go into my brain or scalp — the wires will simply pick up my brain’s normal electrical output and plot the little pulses as graphs.
I am told to watch a series of images while sticking to two rules: only blink between, not during, images (blinking sends the brain signals haywire); and press a button when I recognise an ad that I’ve seen in the quiet room. As well as advertising images, I’ll be shown pictures of the Queen. My response to Her Majesty — both the brain wave and the button-pressing — will serve as a reference point.
What follows is a series of adverts for cream cheese, including several for Philadelphia. Remember, apart from the lawn feeder, I am not aware of having noticed any ads in the quiet room. I see the Queen a lot, and dutifully press the button.
Afterwards, Farwell explains how my brain behaved: “You didn’t press a button to say you recognised the Philadelphia ad but your brain did in fact have a response to Philadelphia.” Farwell reveals that there was a Philadelphia ad in one of the newspapers I’d scanned.
Ah, I tell him, but I didn’t notice it. And I am already familiar with the product — it is a staple of my shopping list. And, two days earlier, I threw out a mouldy tub that had been languishing at the back of the fridge. Could it be this earlier familiarity — rather than anything during the experiment — that is responsible for my brain spike? “We can’t distinguish whether the impact made by Philly on your brain comes from past or present exposure,” Farwell admits. “And you recognise the Queen much more strongly than you recognise cheese.”
More seriously for Kraft Foods, which produces Philadelphia, it shows that, whatever the reason for my spike, its product is on my radar. So, at least a portion of the estimated $850 million that Kraft spends annually on promoting and advertising its brands is not wasted. Farwell is also investigating brain response when a brand is connected with a particular message. Some images (such as a tub of cream cheese with “heavenly” written underneath it) will produce bigger spikes in consumers than others — this reveals what consumers recognise as the values attached to a brand. This is where the future of neuromarketing probably lies — finding the values and messages that produce a P300 Everest.
Neuromarketing is, says Ernie Robson, Farwell’s business manager, a no-brainer. Robson says: “The advertising industry is reckoned to spend around $10 billion a year trying to find out whether or not ads are effective. Why? Because they will spend $100 billion-plus in the media. They want to measure if their message is being recognised. Yet, if you look at how the effectiveness of ads is tested, there’s very little that is really good science.”
Farwell’s results look encouraging for the NMA. Still, I wonder if one can call this “really good science” quite yet. Farwell’s efforts are insightful but too crude to establish exactly why I buy Philadelphia; reassuringly, my spike doesn’t yet tell him it’s because it tastes less salty than Tesco’s own brand. And, leaving aside the electrodes and laptops and P300 spikes, he could have found that out just by asking me.
Winners and losers
Brands that flew:
1. Coca-Cola. Early neuromarketing experiments suggested that, even though Pepsi was preferred in blind taste tests, consumers identified more strongly with the Coca-Cola brand.
2. Ben & Jerry’s: The taste matters less than the hippyish image of its founders, which appeals to baby boomers.
3. Apple’s iPod: inspires staggering affection among users.
4. Samsung: in 2001, the company consolidated all its various brand names under the Samsung umbrella.
5. eBay: recognised the world over despite little traditional advertising.
Brands that flopped:
1. Flavoured Kit Kats. In 2003, flavours such as strawberries and cream were introduced. Sales fell by a fifth.
2. McDonald’s Arch Deluxe burger: the attempt in 1996 to appeal to sophisticated palates with pricier burgers failed.
3. Clairol’s Touch of Yoghurt shampoo: buyers simply disliked the idea of washing their hair in yoghurt.
4. Chrysler’s La Femme: the pink and white car, which came with matching raincoat, compact and cigarette case, was aimed at women but designed by men.
How cars attract us
BrightHouse Neurostrategies in Atlanta was an early pioneer in neuromarketing. It conducted MRI scans of consumers while they were looking at pictures of products. Its Fortune 500 clients have included Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Georgia Pacific (a tissues and packaging company) and MetLife, a life insurance company.
DaimlerChrysler has employed MRI imaging at a research centre in Germany to study how consumers perceive its cars. It found that images of sports cars, rather than saloons or small cars, stimulated the “reward” centre of the brain, which is also stirred by alcohol, drugs and sex.
The car company also found that looking at the front of a car lit up the area of the brain that handles faces, which may explain the popularity of “friendly-looking” cars such as Mini Coopers.
Why Coke, not Pepsi?
It all started with the Pepsi Challenge. Shoppers stopped by Pepsi marketers submitted to a blind taste test between Pepsi and Coke and over and over again Pepsi won. So why did Coke still lead
the market? It was that puzzle that still bothered Read Montague, an American neuroscientist, more than three decades after the advertisements were aired. He set out to solve it, monitoring the brain waves of volunteers as they sampled the two drinks, both blind and knowingly.
For years, marketers had argued they could influence consumers’ choices through the use of brands. Now there was neurological proof they were right. Montague’s findings were published in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, a science journal, and a new marketing cottage industry was born.
CATHERINE PHILP
