Super Bowl XL Commercials Put on Trial in the Brain

Well, we're nearly a week past Super Bowl XL. Other topics have now mostly replaced the after-game talk about quarterbacks and commercials around the office watering hole.

But meanwhile a team of brain scientists at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center,
working with market researchers from FKF Applied Research are still in the debriefing stage. They are busy analyzing data generated by five people who watched the Super Bowl commercials as fMRI scanners eavesdropped on their brains. The researchers have discovered frequent disconnects between what subject told the researchers about their reaction to the commercials and the stories being told deep in the silent reaches of their brains.

In February 1998, American Demographics ran an article I had written entitled “What Your Customer Can’t Say.” (Available under a 7-day trial or write me for a copy.) The article drew the largest reader response in the magazine’s history. In the article, I said the biggest open secret in consumer research was that surveys, interviews and focus groups were deeply flawed mechanisms for finding out what consumers want and what motivates them to choose one product over another. The key points I made were based on then-recent brain research.

In the ensuing eight years, brain research became the fastest developing field in the life sciences. Findings are reported virtually daily in major newspapers. Periodically the brain is given cover story staus in major magazines such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Specials about the brain have become regular features on such broadcast outlets Discovery, TLC and PBS.

Depiste all the media coverage the brain is getting, relatively few people in consumer research and marekting practice are any further along than the average lay person in grasping how the revolution in neuroscience is destined to affect us all in the near future. Over the next five or six years insights about human behavior flowing from brain research labs will radically change the nature of consumer research and marketing practice. The use of surveys and interviews will dramatically shrink . Focus groups will become rare rituals.

People in both consumer research and in marketing practice will increasingly draw on four fields to divine the mysteries of consumer behavior: neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental psychology and anthropology – all fields that currently have no standing whatsoever in marketing curricula.

I’ll talk about each of these fields and the contributions they will make to consumer research and marketing practice in upcoming posts.

To sample the results of the fMRI analysis of consumer responses to Super Bowl XL commercials, click here and here. To see the Super Bowl ads examined in tis research click here.

 

Comments

[Daria]

I think it is great such attemps are being done. It gives us valuable knowledge about human’s brain and its reactions to advertising, however I do believe there is need to compile fMRI data with other traditional quantified data. I am very enthusiastic about neuromarketing but we need more integrated multi-source data before we draw any conclucions.

[David]

Daria,

Couldn't agree with you more. I'm afraid, however, that many people being introduced to "neuromarketing" for the first time view it as the Holy Grail of marketing -- the vessel that will reveal all there is worth knowing about consumer behavior.

Thanks for your comment.

DBW