Neuromarketing – the art of reading your mind to sell you more crap you ‘thought’ you wanted
In this day and age of social media and social marketing it is all about connecting with your friends, finding that brand that cares (ya okay) and then seeing if they are selling something that you want.
Well if the scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have their way that style of marketing will be old hat because marketers will be able to read your mind – literally – in order to sell you exactly what you thought you wanted. The work being done by the scientists at this point is centered around the ability to decode brain activity (thought) into audible sounds, and while this mind-reading requires some 256 electrodes to be surgically attached to your scalp the likelihood of this happening in your corner store is pretty slim – for now.
Of course the final product of something like neuromarketing is still a long way, and thankfully so in my opinion, but not as far as some might like it to be especially when you start combining disparate types of research like the one at Berkeley and the research being conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science.
At Max Planck they are looking at how our decisions are being made and finding out that in fact that our decisions are in fact made up some 10 seconds before we are aware of them. The thinking is that by monitoring the micro patterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex we would be able to predict what the participant would do seven seconds before you or I was even aware that we had made the decision.
Now to you or I seven seconds is a flash in time but to computer algorithms and predictive software that seven seconds might as well be infinity.
With the recent findings made by the neuroscientists at Berkeley and those from the Max Planck Institute, does this mean that the “buy-button” has arrived? Not exactly–and, may I add, thank goodness. Reading our consumer mind is somewhat creepy. However, on the upside, many of the more dated research techniques (questionnaires, for example) are dying a natural death. Questionnaires believe emotions can be determined by “yes” or “no” questions, with a few extra lines to scribble in a more detailed explanation.
The days of relying on one source to draw an empirical conclusion are well and truly gone.
So the reality is that an age when our minds are being read by ever obtrusive marketing machinery and computer programs in order to bring us the true “Minority Report” style of advertising that will know instinctively what we want to buy isn’t going to happen any time soon – but chances are, given the money involved, it will one day happen.
