The Hindu Business Line : Neuromarketing

WELL, it had to happen some time: Only it has happened sooner than feared. In the beginning, there was only market research — a study of consumer behaviour through surveys of their purchases and expressed or implied preferences and choices. Next, consumer behaviour was sought to be influenced by ad blitzes and subliminal marketing. It has now inevitably morphed into neuromarketing, aimed at taking control of the consumer mind and behaviour by putting to work the corkscrews of neuroscience technology.

In this field of study, consumer-volunteers are wired to functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to record the response of their brains to names of companies, sight, taste or use of particular products or brands, or stimuli such as content of advertisements or sales pitch by charting and registering their brain activity.

Neuromarketers hope that by undertaking sufficient number of experiments with as wide a cross-section of consumers in different parts of the world, they would be able to locate areas of the brain to serve as remotely and automatically operated "buy buttons"!

Ongoing research in the US has led to interesting conclusions. For instance, a blind taste test with Pepsi and Coke is said to have shown furious activity in the prefrontal cortex the location of higher thought processes. Similarly, the "reward centres" of the brain were stimulated by sports cars. There were even clearly differentiated responses by the brains of Democrats and Republicans to images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Where will all this monkeying with the consumers' mind end up? Will henceforward companies and their PR outfits be able to dictate to consumers to behave the way they want them to behave? Will it become a commercial weapon making automatons of customers? No, say the protagonists of neuromarketing, the goal is not to change the behaviour of the consumer, but only to change the behaviour of businesses in relation to the consumer.

Yes, says Commercial Alert, a group that opposes commercialisation of American society. Denouncing it as "something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union", it has filed a memorandum with the US Office for Human Research Protections demanding legal action for the violation of federal standards for research on humans.

Which side are you on?

B.S. Raghavan

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