For decades now, advertising’s main decision-making tool has been the focus group. In fact, marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising, as well as billions more in package and product design.
Unfortunately, focus groups are notoriously unreliable because of a fundamental flaw of human psychology: People often do not know their own minds. Also, people tend to tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think. And the members of focus groups are easily swayed by the person with the strongest opinion or the loudest voice in the room. Yet, most purchasing decisions are not made with strangers in a conference room, but alone in the customer’s mind, either at home or at the store.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to find out what people were truly “feeling” about an ad or a product? It would not just get them to tell you what they intellectually perceive, but what emotions are being triggered. Well, that technology already exists — and companies are learning how to put it to use in the real world of consumer products.
While other tools are emerging, the most well-developed technology employed in this work is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging tracks changes in the brain’s activity.
The most common form of fMRI is the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent, or “BOLD” technique. It identifies brain areas with a high level of blood flow, indicating significant neural activity. In a broad sense, BOLD shows what excites consumers. The results suggest which factors, such as metaphors, ads, and the like, elicit positive memories and encode new memory.
In contrast to the highly subjective focus group, MRI scanning offers the promise of concrete facts — an unbiased glimpse at consumers’ minds in action. Put simply, people can’t hide what they really feel from an MRI machine. Their medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when they see something they like, even if they say they do not like it.
This can be important when measuring the impact of subtle design characteristics on consumer attitudes. For example, The New York Times reports that scientists working with...
