NeuroMarketing and Attention
My (The) half-hour session is entirely painless; the apparatus does not irradiate the brain but passively measures its electrical activity at different frequencies to assess my attention, emotional engagement and likely memory retention of each clip.
My electroencephalography (EEG) session typifies the experience of hundreds of subjects who have their brains scanned every day in laboratories around the world, in the cause of better marketing. As they look at product prototypes, packaging designs and advertising campaigns, neuromarketing experts read their brainwaves to glean insights into their unconscious likes and dislikes, which might not appear through questioning in conventional market research.
My thoughts:
- Suppose these neuromarketing techniques were applied to listening at work? Since we spend almost half our day at work in listening situations, wouldn’t it be powerful if we all had some device that was constantly measuring attention, emotional engagement and likely memory retention?
A little too Orwellian you say? Actually, we already do that, but the device is our own powers of observation. People who are trained to pick up signals can tell who’s here and who’s somewhere else.
- Why does it seem to be more reliable when a machine (EEG, MRI) measures listening than when a person uses intuition and honed habits to make those determinations? Research tells us that people yearn for definitive/right answers, and humans can make too many assumptions and mistakes; whereas a machine will provide objective, data-driven results. I’d love to see a true comparison done at a workplace meeting.
- Is neuromarketing a flavor of the day, or does it supply solid, valuable information that can be used in positive ways? Personally, I don’t care if the data are mined to sell people stuff—advertising has always been on the forefront of using new techniques to get to the consumer.
- But let’s turn the conversation to the transformational uses. What comes first to mind for me is to use it to differentiate teaching that will excite, turn on, engage students. Can you imagine pairing teaching techniques with listening preferences?
And then there’s our political systems. People are protesting around the world because they want access to decisions, policies, fair rule-of-law, information, technology, speech, and many more. Many of the U.S. politicians are out of touch with their constituencies. If they really want to represent their constituencies, they’d use neuromarketing to discover what their people value and create programs/policies that matter instead of projecting their beliefs, value systems, and antiquated party lines onto everyone else.
What ideas do you have for positive uses of neuromarketing?
