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Some thoughts on neuromarketing.

I’d like to highlight
an article on neuromarketing by Eben Harrell. (This article is also related to content in the recent book Nita Farahany). The article talks about the emerging practice of neuromarketing, that is, ascertaining a person’s interest in buying a product or service through various neuroscience techniques. Such techniques include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or an
electroencephalogram (EEG).

The fundamental premise behind neuromarketing is to more directly ascertain what is going on in someone’s brain. With traditional marketing approaches, like surveys, individuals’ responses are not always an accurate reflection of what is going on in their minds. This can be simply due to forgetting, but it can also be due to people feeling ashamed or uninterested in revealing their true motivations.

Potentially, neuromarketing techniques can determine whether people’s brains are stimulated by things that they don’t want to reveal. An example would be putting a product in front of a person, for instance, a sweet or salty food that they don’t want to admit they want to eat, and then visualizing in an fMRI that their minds are, in fact, stimulated by the product. Regarding the techniques, fMRI is thought of as a more accurate approach and gives a better sense of which area of the brain is activated, but it requires much more cumbersome equipment in comparison to EEG.

A more controversial aspect of neuromarketing goes beyond observing and directly tries to implant or influence people’s thinking subconsciously. The idea of subconscious suggestion has been around for a long time. However, incorporating specific neuroscience interventions goes further, such as putting ideas in people’s dreams or, instead of just monitoring the brain through something implanted on the scalp, actively trying to influence it, for instance, through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

Neuromarketing techniques, particularly those that involve directly influencing the brain but even those that just observe it, are ethically fraught, and privacy implications and issues related to free will and choice must be considered. (These are discussed in detail in Farahany (’23).) A number of the ethical issues associated with neuromarketing seem innocuous. For example, Harrell’s article indicates that research has shown that an EEG or fMRI is better able to determine what movie a person likes than focus groups or surveys. However, when one inquires instead about political preferences or party affiliation, this becomes more ethically fraught. There is a spectrum from simply looking at someone’s eye gaze or attention and trying to gauge the degree to which they are interested in something, all the way to putting them into an fMRI machine. It is difficult to know where the ethical line is crossed.

Harrell’s article also alludes to the integration of neuro-sensing devices with other devices. One can imagine a frightening scenario where the ECG in one’s Apple Watch (or maybe an EEG in future iGlasses) is connected to a neuromarketing campaign, and as one watched television or looked at products, various readings from this would be correlated. Finally, the idea of directly manipulating one’s brain with TMS or even ingested chemicals is worrisome.

Overall, I think that there is a lot of promise in neuromarketing. In a sense, it’s a natural extension of the marketer trying to ascertain exactly what the consumer wants, improving upon other marketing techniques that use only indirect proxies of what is going on in the mind. However, it crosses over into certain ethical gray zones that must be taken into account.

References

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology , Farahany, Nita A (2023).
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Your-Brain-Defending-Neurotechnology-ebook/dp/B09Y45MY2VLinks to an external site.

Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know
https://hbr.org/2019/01/neuromarketing-what-you-need-to-knowLinks to an external site.
Eben Harrell (2019)