Neurotrash!

“I don’t think you’re going to stress your customers out for two years before you sell them the product.”

Neuromarketing is the practice of tracking activity in the human brain, observing activity, thought patterns and more to hopefully understand customers on a deeper level. EEG (electroencephalogram), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a never-ending, hyper-sophisticated toolkit are used to understand and explain how we react to ads, experiences and products. Experts in the field garner attention from marketers the world over and neuromarketing theories and practice have – guilty as charged – even appeared in the pages of Marketing throughout the years.

Here, Marketing meets with Harvard neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath for an expert’s take, putting the tools and tropes promoted by neuromarketers to the test. Spoiler alert: it’s not looking good.

1. TOOLS

THE STORY: neuromarketers conduct studies with state-of-the-art brain-tracking instruments like EEG and MRI to glean insights into what’s going on in consumers’ brains.

The truth: you’re much better off sending out a questionnaire.

To be of any use to marketers, neuromarketing has to provide a sophisticated, detailed and scientific understanding. The problem is, says Cooney Horvath, “all of the neuroscience tools, except for one, undershoot questionnaires by about 30 to 70 percent,” in terms of accuracy and insight.

Questionnaires – neuro or otherwise – aren’t exactly the sexiest tools in today’s world of marketing automation and real-time datalytics. Is it our obsession with the latest and most detailed insight that leads us to neuromarketing?”

“People go, ‘cool, we can avoid the questionnaires and go straight to the source – to the brain’,” he says, “but