Marketing (and other Business) majors are going to be walking into a world of market research that makes all preceding tried-and-true techniques seem primitive - the realm of Neural Marketing.
Neural marketing, for us lay-folks, allows market researchers a glimpse inside the brains of their potential customers to understand their (often unconscious!) preferences and tendencies. MRI data from research subjects, for example, may explain why you like Mozart and I prefer Beethoven - or, from a consumer point of view, why a taste test tilts towards Pepsi over Coke, yet a taste-test augmented by brand-recognition results in Coke besting Pepsi.
The reason? There are two separate brain systems--one involving taste and one recalling cultural influence--in the prefrontal cortex interact to determine preferences. This partially explains the old market-researchers' lament that "Focus groups lie"... point being, the test subjects are not dishonest, it's just that what they say they want versus what they really want (due to unconscious emotional attachements, reward stimulations, etc.) are often two different things. For example, they may say that low price is most important, but what's really important is better customer service...
So fascinating is the field that a 2007 study at NYU and UCLA, using electroencephalographs, could record clear differences in liberal vs. conservative brain patterns (note: this isn't just political, it's "how people think").
The implications of neural marketing are enormous, of course: Product designs and advertising campaigns will become more and more successful as vendors/marketers learn how to get their message - and appeal - through to customers already swimming in a deluge of confusing "TMI."
[ There are social implications, too - as neural marketing enables vendors to reinforce their product/service stimulus (known as 'priming' to advertisers) by amplifying the "pleasure" or "reward" part of consumers' brains, some fear we face an Orwellian future where consumers are nothing more than Pavlov's dogs (more than now, you wonder?) for the high priests of Madison Avenue. ]
I suspect that the marketing/business professional of the (near!) future will not only have to understand the traditional five P's (product, price, packaging, promotion and place) but also a modicum of statistics, IT, and even neuro-biology.
Hopefully, high school and college curricula, career centers and employer internships will soon be addressing neural marketing. Like globalization, it's here now, whether we like it or not, or even recognize it.
Neural marketing, for us lay-folks, allows market researchers a glimpse inside the brains of their potential customers to understand their (often unconscious!) preferences and tendencies. MRI data from research subjects, for example, may explain why you like Mozart and I prefer Beethoven - or, from a consumer point of view, why a taste test tilts towards Pepsi over Coke, yet a taste-test augmented by brand-recognition results in Coke besting Pepsi.
The reason? There are two separate brain systems--one involving taste and one recalling cultural influence--in the prefrontal cortex interact to determine preferences. This partially explains the old market-researchers' lament that "Focus groups lie"... point being, the test subjects are not dishonest, it's just that what they say they want versus what they really want (due to unconscious emotional attachements, reward stimulations, etc.) are often two different things. For example, they may say that low price is most important, but what's really important is better customer service...
So fascinating is the field that a 2007 study at NYU and UCLA, using electroencephalographs, could record clear differences in liberal vs. conservative brain patterns (note: this isn't just political, it's "how people think").
The implications of neural marketing are enormous, of course: Product designs and advertising campaigns will become more and more successful as vendors/marketers learn how to get their message - and appeal - through to customers already swimming in a deluge of confusing "TMI."
[ There are social implications, too - as neural marketing enables vendors to reinforce their product/service stimulus (known as 'priming' to advertisers) by amplifying the "pleasure" or "reward" part of consumers' brains, some fear we face an Orwellian future where consumers are nothing more than Pavlov's dogs (more than now, you wonder?) for the high priests of Madison Avenue. ]
I suspect that the marketing/business professional of the (near!) future will not only have to understand the traditional five P's (product, price, packaging, promotion and place) but also a modicum of statistics, IT, and even neuro-biology.
Hopefully, high school and college curricula, career centers and employer internships will soon be addressing neural marketing. Like globalization, it's here now, whether we like it or not, or even recognize it.
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