136. Our frontal lobes prefer Coke
Incredible! Here's an article in today's New York Times Magazine
that is a direct reflection of the evolutionary-economics theory I've
been espousing -- seemingly alone -- for most of this year.
In brief, my hypothesis is that our frontal lobes (of which we have
plenty, in contrast to our primate cousins, such as the chimps) have the
ability to embellish anything that has deeper significance in the
evolutionary older parts of the brain. What I am saying generally
is that a significant proportion of the whole succession of consumer
goods that has ever been traded since the earliest days of man (starting
with pigments for bodily ornamentation 75,000+ years ago) are deeply
concerned with male status ranking. From the sexual selection point of
view (a very considerable influence in the evolution of our species),
male status ranking (and the corollary of the female choice of
appropriate-ranking males) is the most important parameter in the
evolution of our species.
Of course, there are other 'deep' instincts/pleasures/etc, of lesser or
greater survival value in our brain, and the article below starts by
discussing a trivial one -- some experiments concerning the differential
pleasures experienced between Coke and Pepsi, even though they are almost
indistinguishable in chemical and taste bud terms.
Many more interesting observations to do with economics can be made from
the following article but, as it's already long, I will forbear to do so
here and now.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
THERE'S A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE IN EVERY MEDIAL PREFRONTAL
CORTEX
Clive Thompson
When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a
43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known
to contemplate the other mysteries of life for instance, the Pepsi
Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that
pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the
winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so
strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?
Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a
scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects
and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine,
recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV
campaign Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the
brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward.
(Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they
receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred
Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi
than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.
In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried
to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by
repeating the experiment with a small variation this time, he announced
which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable almost
all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain
activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in
the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say
governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were
meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing
memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to
shape their preference.
Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague
reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer
of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed he had
demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the
special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.
Measuring brand influence might seem like an unusual activity for a
neuroscientist, but Montague is just one of a growing breed of
researchers who are applying the methods of the neurology lab to the
questions of the advertising world. Some of these researchers, like
Montague, are purely academic in focus, studying the consumer mind out of
intellectual curiosity, with no corporate support. Increasingly, though,
there are others -- like several of the researchers at the Mind of the
Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School -- who work as full-fledged
''neuromarketers,'' conducting brain research with the help of corporate
financing and sharing their results with their sponsors. This summer,
when it opened its doors for business, the BrightHouse Institute for
Thought Sciences in Atlanta became the first neuromarketing firm to boast
a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. (The client's
identity is currently a secret.) The institute will scan the brains of a
representative sample of its client's prospective customers, assess their
reactions to the company's products and advertising and tweak the
corporate image accordingly.
Not long ago, M.R.I. machines were used solely for medical purposes, like
diagnosing strokes or discovering tumors. But neuroscience has reached a
sort of cocky adolescence; it has become routine to read about
researchers tackling every subject under the sun, placing test subjects
in M.R.I. machines and analyzing their brain activity as they do
everything from making moral choices to praying to appreciating beauty.
Paul C. Lauterbur, a chemist who shared this year's Nobel Prize in
medicine for his contribution in the early 70's to the invention of the
M.R.I. machine, notes how novel the uses of his invention have become.
''Things are getting a lot more subtle than we'd ever thought,'' he says.
It seems only natural that the commercial world has finally caught on.
''You don't have to be a genius to say, 'My God, if you combine making
the can red with making it less sweet, you can measure this in a scanner
and see the result,''' Montague says. ''If I were Pepsi, I'd go in there
and I'd start scanning people.''
The neuroscience wing at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta is the
epicenter of the neuromarketing world. Like most medical wards, it is
filled with an air of quiet, antiseptic tension. On a recent visit, in
the hallway outside an M.R.I. room, a patient milled around in a light
blue paper gown. A doctor on a bench flipped through a clipboard and
talked in soothing tones to a man in glasses, a young woman anxiously
clutching his arm.
It was not a place where you would expect to encounter slick marketing
research. And when Justine Meaux, a research scientist for the
BrightHouse Institute, came out to greet me, she did seem strangely out
of place. Clicking along in strappy sandals, with a tight sleeveless top
and purple toenail polish, she looked more like a chic TV producer than a
neuroscientist, which she is. Her specialty, as she explained, is ''the
neural dynamics of the perception and production of rhythmic sensorimotor
patterns'' -- though these days she spends her professional life thinking
about shopping. ''I'm really getting into reading all this business stuff
now, learning about campaigns, branding,'' she said, leading me down the
hallway to the M.R.I. chamber that the Institute uses. Three years ago,
after earning her Ph.D., she decided she wanted to apply brain scanning
to everyday problems and was intrigued by marketing as a ''practical
application of psychology,'' as she put it. She told me that she admired
the ''Intel Inside'' advertising campaign, with its TV spots showing
dancing men in body suits. ''Intel actually branded the inside of a
computer,'' she marveled. ''They took the most abstract thing you can
imagine and figured out a way to make people identify with it.''
When we reached the M.R.I. control room, Clint Kilts, the scientific
director of the BrightHouse Institute, was fiddling away at a computer
keyboard. A professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral
sciences at Emory, Kilts began working with Meaux in 2001. Meaux had
learned that Kilts and a group of marketers were founding the BrightHouse
Institute, and she joined their team, becoming perhaps the world's first
full-time neuromarketer. Kilts is confident that there will soon be room
for other full-time careers in neuromarketing. ''You will actually see
this being part of the decision-making process, up and down the
company,'' he predicted. ''You are going to see more large companies that
will have neuroscience divisions.''
The BrightHouse Institute's techniques are based, in part, on an
experiment that Kilts conducted earlier this year. He gathered a group of
test subjects and asked them to look at a series of commercial products,
rating how strongly they liked or disliked them. Then, while scanning
their brains in an M.R.I. machine, he showed them pictures of the
products again. When Kilts looked at the images of their brains, he was
struck by one particular result whenever a subject saw a product he had
identified as one he truly loved -- something that might prompt him to
say, ''That's just so me!'' -- his brain would show increased activity in
the medial prefrontal cortex.
Kilts was excited, for he knew that this region of the brain is commonly
associated with our sense of self. Patients with damage in this area of
the brain, for instance, often undergo drastic changes in personality; in
one famous case, a mild-mannered 19th-century railworker named Phineas
Gage abruptly became belligerent after an accident that destroyed his
medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, M.R.I. studies have found
increased activity in this region when people are asked if adjectives
like ''trustworthy'' or ''courageous'' apply to them. When the medial
prefrontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner,
with what sort of person you are. If it fires when you see a particular
product, Kilts argues, it's most likely to be because the product clicks
with your self-image.
This result provided the BrightHouse Institute with an elegant tool for
testing marketing campaigns and brands. An immediate, intuitive bond
between consumer and product is one that every company dreams of making.
''If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger
gestalt of who you self-attribute as,'' Kilts said, using
psychology-speak. ''You're a Chevy guy.'' With the help of
neuromarketers, he claims, companies can now know with certainty whether
their products are making that special connection.
To demonstrate their technique, Kilts and Meaux offered to stick my head
in the M.R.I. machine. They laid me down headfirst in the coffinlike
cylinder and scurried out to the observation room. ''Here's what I want
you to do,'' Meaux said, her voice crackling over an intercom. ''I'm
going to show you a bunch of images of products and activities -- and I
want you to picture yourself using them. Don't think about whether you
like them or not. Just put yourself in the scene.''
I peered up into a mirror positioned over my head, and she began flashing
pictures. There were images of a Hummer, a mountain bike, a can of Pepsi.
Then a Lincoln Navigator, Martha Stewart, a game of basketball and dozens
more snapshots of everyday consumption. I imagined piloting the Hummer
off-road, playing a game of pickup basketball, swigging the Pepsi. (I was
less sure what to do with Martha Stewart.)
After about 15 minutes, Kilts pulled me out, and I joined him at a bank
of computers. ''Look here,'' he said, pointing to a screen that showed an
image of a brain in cross sections. He pointed to a bright yellow spot on
the right side, in the somatosensory cortex, an area that shows activity
when you emulate sensory experience -- as when I imagined what it would
be like to drive a Hummer. If a marketer finds that his product is
producing a response in this region of the brain, he can conclude that he
has not made the immediate, instinctive sell even if a consumer has a
positive attitude toward the product, if he has to mentally ''try it
out,'' he isn't instantly identifying with it.
Kilts stabbed his finger at another glowing yellow dot near the top of
the brain. It was the magic spot -- the medial prefrontal cortex. If that
area is firing, a consumer isn't deliberating, he said he's itching to
buy. ''At that point, it's intuitive. You say 'I'm going to do it. I want
it.' ''
The consuming public has long had an uneasy feeling about scientists who
dabble in marketing. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote The Hidden
Persuaders, a book about marketing that featured harsh criticism of
''psychology professors turned merchandisers.'' Marketers, Packard
worried, were using the resources of the social sciences to understand
consumers' irrational and emotional urges -- the better to trick them
into increased product consumption. In rabble-rousing prose, Packard
warned about subliminal advertising and cited a famous (though, it turned
out, bogus) study about a movie theater that inserted into a film several
split-second frames urging patrons to drink Coke.
In truth, marketers only wish they had that much control. If anything,
corporations tend to look slightly askance at their admen, because
there's not much convincing evidence that advertising works as well as
promised. John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th
century, famously quipped that half the money he spent on advertising was
wasted, but that he didn't know which half. In their quest for a more
respectable methodology -- or perhaps more important, the appearance of
one -- admen have plundered one scientific technique after another.
Demographic studies have profiled customers by analyzing their age, race
or neighborhood; telephone surveys have queried semi-randomly selected
strangers to see how the public at large viewed a company's product.
Advertising's main tool, of course, has been the focus group, a classic
technique of social science. Marketers in the United States spent more
than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided
about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a
basic flaw of human psychology people often do not know their own minds.
Joey Reiman is the C.E.O. of BrightHouse, an Atlanta marketing firm, and
a founding partner in the BrightHouse Institute; over years of producing
marketing concepts for companies like Coca-Cola and Red Lobster, he has
come to the conclusion that focus groups are ultimately less about
gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete
justifications for a hugely expensive ad campaign. ''The sad fact is,
people tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think,'' he
says. ''Sometimes there's a focus-group bully, a loudmouth who's so
insistent about his opinion that it influences everyone else. This is not
a science; it's a circus.''
In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an
unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine,
you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex
will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not
to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go,
'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''
Other neuromarketers have demonstrated that we react to products in ways
that we may not be entirely conscious of. This year, for instance,
scientists working with DaimlerChrysler scanned the brains of a number of
men as they looked at pictures of cars and rated them for attractiveness.
The scientists found that the most popular vehicles -- the Porsche- and
Ferrari-style sports cars -- triggered activity in a section of the brain
called the fusiform face area, which governs facial recognition. ''They
were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars,'' says Henrik
Walter, a psychiatrist at the University of Ulm in Germany who ran the
study. ''The lights of the cars look a little like eyes.''
Neuromarketing may also be able to suss out the distinction between
advertisements that people merely like and those that are actually
effective -- a difference that can be hard to detect from a focus group.
A neuromarketing study in Australia, for instance, demonstrated that
supershort, MTV-style jump cuts -- indeed, any scenes shorter than two
seconds -- aren't as likely to enter the long-term memory of viewers,
however bracing or aesthetically pleasing they may be.
Still, many scientists are skeptical of neuromarketing. The brain,
critics point out, is still mostly an enigma; just because we can see
neurons firing doesn't mean we always know what the mind is doing. For
all their admirable successes, neuroscientists do not yet have an
agreed-upon map of the brain. ''I keep joking that I could do this Gucci
shoes study, where I'd show people shoes I think are beautiful, and see
whether women like them,'' says Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of
psychology at New York University. ''And I'll see activity in the brain.
I definitely will. But it's not like I've found 'the shoe center of the
brain.''' James Twitchell, a professor of advertising at the University
of Florida, wonders whether neuromarketing isn't just the next stage of
scientific pretense on the part of the advertising industry. ''Remember,
you have to ask the client for millions, millions of dollars,'' he says.
''So you have to say 'Trust me. We have data. We've done these
neurotests. Go with us, we know what we're doing.''' Twitchell recently
attended an advertising conference where a marketer discussed
neuromarketing. The entire room sat in awe as the speaker suggested that
neuroscience will finally crack open the mind of the shopper. ''A lot of
it is just garbage,'' he says, ''but the garbage is so powerful.''
In response to his critics, Kilts plans to publish the BrightHouse
research in an accredited academic journal. He insisted to me that his
primary allegiance is to science; BrightHouse's techniques are ''business
done in the science method,'' he said, ''not science done in the business
method.'' And as he sat at his computer, calling up a 3-D picture of a
brain, it was hard not to be struck, at the very least, by the
seriousness of his passion. There, on the screen, was the medial
prefrontal cortex, juggling our conscious thinking. There was the
amygdala, governing our fears, buried deep in the brain. These are sights
that he said still inspire in him feelings of wonder. ''When you sit down
and you're watching -- for the first time in the history of mankind --
how we process complex primary emotions like anger, it's amazing,'' he
said. ''You're like, there, look at that that's anger, that's pleasure.
When you see that roll off the workstation, you never look back.'' You
just keep going, it seems, until you hit Madison Avenue.
New York Times Magazine -- 26 October 2003
Clive Thompson writes frequently about science and technology. His
most recent article for the magazine was about the future of kitchen
tools.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
