As a commercial psychologist and semiotician, I've been working in the interface between brain and science for some time now, peeking inside the black box (check out our company logo if you don't believe me!).
Now don't worry that I'm going to say something controversial like neuroscience is bad -- I'm not, it's all good. However I will provide a cautionary tale.
Neuroscience and marketing is being presented as some sort of Holy Grail when perhaps a more "Emperor's New Clothes" stance is in order. True insight, the kind that can be used to generate real revenue, is never in the "what" but always in the "why".
Let me give you an example: a recent neuro-marketing study on food identified that people with "higher reward sensitivity" show increased activity in five key areas of the brain closely implicated in motivation and reward using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twelve men and women were tested. The conclusion was that more appetising images of food would help to sell more of that food. However they could not prove a link between activation levels and actual consumption.
So what is it that's missing that would make this study more useful? The study fails to qualitatively quantify what sorts of attractive images "appeal" and how to leverage this information. Semiotics can and does provide this quantification, and more than that it can tackle tricky questions of how even wonderful food, if inappropriately packaged or presented, is destined to fail and to end up as a de-listed product.
I'd love to give the name of the brand I worked on, but due to that pesky thing called confidentiality (we do new product development work) I can't. Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that the taste and look was great but the product still bombed because consumers were confused about the cultural associations linked to the food, and this despite that fact that it was a "chocolate product" -- makes you wonder how hard it is to get it so wrong.
Semiotics is a cultural studies technique that questions how attitudes, beliefs and perceptions are created in the consumer's head in the first place and how understanding the resulting identifiable codes can help a client control messaging at all levels. Neat, huh?
But imagine how powerful neuroscience would be if combined with semiotics -- wow! Potentially, it could provide a seamless link between the "what" and the "why". For the moment though, just think a moment on which of those answers you'd rather have when making a difficult branding decision before you rush to the MRI suite.
If you have an opinion on this or any other issue raised on Brand Republic, join the debate in the .