What Neuroscience Tells Us About Consumer Desire

In the early 1950s, two scientists at McGill University inadvertently discovered an area of the rodent brain
dubbed "the pleasure center," located deep in the nucleus accumbens. When a group of lab rats had the
opportunity to stimulate their own pleasure centers via a lever-activated electrical current, they pressed the
lever over and over again, hundreds of times per hour, foregoing food or sleep, until many of them dropped
dead from exhaustion. Further research found pleasure centers exist in human brains, too.

"People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or
even how much they will pay for an item. But they aren't very good at
accessing where that value comes from, or how and when it is influenced
by factors like store displays or brands."
Most humans are a little more complicated than rats, of course. But we are largely motivated by what makes us
feel good, especially when it comes to our purchasing decisions. To that end, many major corporations have
begun to take special interest in how understanding the human brain can help them better understand
consumers. Enter a nascent but fast-growing field called neuromarketing, which uses brain-tracking tools to
determine why we prefer some products over others.

"People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much they will pay for an
item," says Uma R. Karmarkar, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who sports PhDs in both
marketing and neuroscience. "But they aren't very good at accessing where that value comes from, or how and
when it is influenced by factors like store displays or brands. [Neuroscience] can help us understand those
hidden elements of the decision process."

To be sure, there is a clear difference between the goals of academia and the goals of a corporation in utilizing
neuroscience. For Karmarkar, her work falls into the category of decision neuroscience, which is the study of
what our brains do as we make choices. She harbors no motive other than to understand that process and its
implications for behavior, and draws on concepts and techniques from neuroscience to inform her research in
marketing.

For corporations, on the other hand, the science is a means to an end goal of selling more stuff. But the tools,
once restricted to biomedical research, are largely the same. And Karmarkar expects brain data to play a key
role in future research on consumer choice.

(In a recent HBS industry background note on neuromarketing, she discusses the techniques that have helped
researchers decode secrets such as why people love artificially colored snack food and how to predict whether
a pop song will be a hit or a flop.)

Tricks of the trade

When tracking brain functions, neuroscientists generally use either electroencephalography (EEG) or functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. EEG measures fluctuations in the electrical activity directly
below the scalp, which occurs as a result of neural activity. By attaching electrodes to subjects' heads and
evaluating the electrical patterns of their brain waves, researchers can track the intensity of visceral responses
such as anger, lust, disgust, and excitement.

Karmarkar cites the example of junk-food giant Frito-Lay, which in 2008 hired a neuromarketing firm to look into
how consumers respond to Cheetos, the top-selling brand of cheese puffs in the United States. Using EEG
technology on a group of willing subjects, the firm determined that consumers respond strongly to the fact that
eating Cheetos turns their fingers orange with residual cheese dust. In her note, Karmarkar cites an article in
the August 2011 issue of Fast Company, which describes how the EEG patterns indicated "a sense of giddy
subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product."

That data in hand, Frito-Lay moved ahead with an ad campaign called "The Orange Underground," featuring a
series of 30-second TV spots in which the Cheetos mascot, Chester Cheetah, encourages consumers to
commit subversive acts with Cheetos. (In one commercial, an airline passenger quietly sticks Cheetos up the
nostrils of a snoring seatmate. Problem solved.) The campaign garnered Frito-Lay a 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award
from the Advertising Research Foundation.

EEG vs. fMRI

Karmarkar notes that EEG and fMRI have different strengths and weaknesses, and that EEG has some
limitations in its reach. "The cap of electrodes sits on the surface of your head, so you're never going to get to
the deep areas of the brain with EEG," Karmarkar explains.

The fMRI uses a giant magnet, often 3 Teslas strong, to track the blood flow throughout the brain as test
subjects respond to visual, audio, or even taste cues. The technology has its own logistical limitations. Running
an fMRI scanner costs researchers up to $1,000 per hour, and studies often use 20-30 subjects, Karmarkar
says. And while EEG lets subjects move around during testing, fMRI requires them to lie very still inside a
machine that can be intimidating.

"This is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment that exerts a very strong magnetic field at all times, and it's
important to be very careful around it," Karmarkar says. "For example, you cannot take metal into a magnet
room!"

"Expressions of happiness in some Eastern cultures are expressed as a

sense of calm or peace, whereas in some Western cultures, happiness
means jumping around with joy and excitement."

But fMRI is invaluable to neuroscience and neuromarketing in that it gives researchers a view into the
aforementioned pleasure center. "The more desirable something is, the more significant the changes in blood
flow in that part of the brain," Karmarkar says. "Studies have shown activity in that brain area can predict the
future popularity of a product or experience."

In her note, Karmarkar discusses research by Emory University's Gregory Berns and Sara Moore, who
connected the dots between neural activity and success in the music industry. In a seminal lab experiment,
teenagers listened to a series of new, relatively unknown songs while lying inside an fMRI machine. The
researchers found that the activity within the adolescents' pleasure centers correlated with whether a song
achieved eventual commercial success. The OneRepublic song Apologizeperformed especially well in both the
brain scans and the market.

"Importantly, Berns and Moore also asked their original study participants how much they liked the songs they
heard, but those responses were not able to predict sales," Karmarker's note states, illustrating the marketing
value of subconscious cerebral data.

Neuromarketing can provide important but complex data to companies that target a global audience. While
product testing may provide similar neural responses in American and Asian subjects, for instance, the
marketing implications may be very different.

"Expressions of happiness in some Eastern cultures are expressed as a sense of calm or peace, whereas in
some Western cultures, happiness means jumping around with joy and excitement," Karmarkar explains. "So
you might get two totally different fMRI results that actually mean the same thingor you may have two totally
different stimuli create the desired effect of profound happiness, but for different reasons. If you get an excited
effect in an Eastern market, it may not be a good outcome, even though that was the effect you wanted in a
Western market. On the other hand, a sense of peace might be misconstrued as a failure."

Valid concerns
For businesses looking to enlist the services of a neuromarketing company, she advises watching out for
consultanting firms that claim to offer such services but don't really have the technology or expertise to back up
the claim. Rather, look for a company whose employees have a healthy, skeptical respect for neuroscience.

"The rubric for picking a good [firm] is making sure it was started by a scientist, or has a good science advisory
board," Karmarkar says. "This is a field where scientists are very, very skeptical, and we should be. It's easy to
feel like you've discovered some big, important truth when you see that the brain has done something that
correlates with behavior. And it's just as easy to overstate our conclusions."

For consumers, the idea of giving advertisers additional insight into the subconscious mind might prompt
privacy concerns. But Karmarkar says that the research is more about understanding brain waves, not
controlling them.

"It's similar to the concerns about genetics," she explains. "People wonder, now that we can map the genome,
are we going to manipulate the genome? I think it's a valid and important question to ask. But I don't think it's
the direction that companies should take or that academics are taking."

She adds, though, that we need to keep in mind that advertisers have been successfully controlling our brains,
to some extent, since long before the existence of EEG or fMRI technology.

"Imagine Angelina Jolie biting into an apple," she says. "It's the juiciest apple ever. She's licking her lips.
There's juice running down her chin. Now if I spend some time setting up that scenario and then follow up by
asking you to tell me how much you like Mac computers, I promise you that you'll rate them more highly than
you would have if I hadn't just talked about how great that apple was for Angelina Jolie. So, yes, I just used
your brain to manipulate you. Sex sells, and it has since the dawn of time. It sells because it engages that
pleasurable reward center of your brain. As academics, neuroscience just helps us to understand how."