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Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business
Dan Ariely and Gregory S. Berns
Abstract | The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing neuromarketing has recently gained considerable popularity. We propose that there are two main reasons for this trend. First, the possibility that neuroimaging will become cheaper and faster than other marketing methods; and second, the hope that neuroimaging will provide marketers with information that is not obtainable through conventional marketing methods. Although neuroimaging is unlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future, there is growing evidence that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience. The most promising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before a product is even released when it is just an idea being developed.
Despite many common beliefs about the inherently evil nature of marketing, the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people. Marketing serves the dual goals of guiding the design and presentation of products such that they are more compatible with consumer preferences and facilitating the choice process for the consumer. Marketers achieve these goals by providing product designers with information about what consumers value and want before a product is created. After a product emerges on the marketplace, marketers attempt to maximize sales by guiding the menu of offerings, choices, pricing, advertising and promotions.
In their attempts to provide these types of inputs, marketers use a range of market research techniques, from focus groupsand individual surveys to actual market tests with many approaches in between (see http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v11/n4/suppinfo/nrn2795.html
Web End =Supplementary information S1 (box)). In general, the simpler approaches (focus groups and surveys) are easy and cheap to implement but they provide data that can include biases, and are therefore seen asnot very accurate14. The approaches that are more complex and therefore harder to implement, such as market tests, provide more accurate data but incur a higher cost, and the product, production and distribution systems have to be in place for market tests to be conducted. There are some compromise approaches between these two extremes, which...