Neuromarketing: The New Frontier of Marketing
Throughout our class discussions and papers written, we have debated opposing arguments about the ethical repercussions of marketing to children. In this paper I have decided to take it to an alternative level and evaluate the forefront of marketing, where it is heading, how it works, and attempt to bridge the gap on how this form of research affect children of various ages. Along with all of this, another debatable topic is the moral and ethical issues faced with this expanding sect of marketing.
Neuromarketing: What is it?
Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. According to some, neuromarketing will change market research and marketing fundamentally. This new form of research is derived from the argument that people don't and can't really know what motivates them, because much of our mental processes are unconscious. However, the truth is that most decisions do involve both automatic, instinctive reactions, and elements of control and consideration.
Tools of Neuromarketing:
There are many tools used in the study of neuroscience to determine specific chemical changes as well as neurological changes in the human brain. It is the understanding that the researcher’s use of these tools can measure various levels of change in the human body when visually confronted with images and/or video clips. The results of these changes are then compared to the scientific theories of where these changes took place in the brain and what that part of the brain it correlates to. Many studies have shown that specific areas in the brain evoke emotions, such as anger, excitement, intenseness, sadness, feelings of self, reward, and happiness.
Two main areas of focus are the Ventral Putamen, which is thought to process feelings of reward and the Medial Prefrontal Cortex, which is an area of the brain that scientist say govern high-level cognitive powers (Thompson, Clive). Dr. Clinton D. Kilts, Founding Director of The Brain Imaging Research Center and Scientific Director of The BrightHouse Institute's studies showed that activity in the pre-frontal cortex can increase relative to baseline when participants read persuasive messages attributed to experts. When Dr. Kilts applied neuroimaging by use of a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look at the images of the brain, 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. These methods add further understanding to marketing issues. They have begun to see that this adds predictive powers to their research and help us explain behavior more effectively.
Another study performed by Klucharev, Smidts, & Fernandez have found that several critical brain areas have been found to be more active in the presence of ads that produce positive emotional valence. Also, they also measured that celebrities enhance the memory encoding for objects they are paired with in ads.
Top neuromarketing companies use several of these tools to their disposal in order to peer into the mind of the consumer. Millward Brown states on their website that they are the leading research agency to have a dedicated global neuroscience practice. Their neuroscience practice offers solutions that are integrated into their existing research studies to provide additional insights. This marketing firm is focused on four types of approaches to understand what the consumer reacts to, and can be customized to meet the needs of various clients.
The first approach- implicit association measurement uses reaction-time measures as indirect metrics of brand and advertising associations, and emotional responses to ideas. Furthermore, they have found that implicit association (reaction time) measures of emotional response to brands can help account for behavior. For instance, in a recent study they found they could significantly enhance their ability to explain Twitter usage by including implicit measurement - as an impulsive behavior. It is perhaps not surprising that people who feel intuitively positive about Twitter is more likely to tweet more often, and that this is as strong an influence as their stated attitudes (Skuse, David H.).
The second approach is a technique termed -eye tracking. This technology is used to monitor a person’s eye movements as they interact with ads or other marketing stimuli to see what captures their visual attention. This also tells them how a person navigates a website and communicates. Eye tracking has revealed that, in surveys, people tend to overestimate their likelihood of looking at or reading whole areas of sites or ads, and in particular that is true of brands and advertising.
Another tool of this research is Electro-encephalograph (EEG), Electro-cardiograph (EKG), as well as other biometrics like heart rate and skin conductance which has allowed them to look at a person’s immediate response to a target stimulus, without relying on self-report. Lastly, automated facial coding which continuously records people's faces while they watch ads, and automatically code their expressions (e.g. smiles, eyebrow raises, frowns, etc.) is yet another tool used by neuromarketing researchers. Millward Brown states that with this technology, they are “able to understand people's emotional reactions to communications, on a moment-by-moment basis, and therefore pick up nuances that people are unable to report” (Page, Graham). Likewise, facial coding often reveals the more negative emotional reactions that people, in the interests of politeness, are unwilling to reveal on surveys.
Traditional Methods of Marketing:
Regardless of all these technological advancements in the research studies, the traditional methods of market research are still in full effect. It is the combination of both direct questioning and indirect measurement that yields the most value. Charles A. Nelson states that ”We should therefore think of 'neuromarketing' as having a 'Small Promise' - to provide an additional dimension of insight, specifically into people's intuitive responses, rather than as being the only path to a deeper truth.” The right neuromarketing methods, used for the right job, and interpreted realistically; add genuine value, especially about emotional responses. However, they are part of the market researchers' toolkit, and not the only tool in use.
Some of these other methods are: open-ended interviews, which can yield great amounts of information so that it is easier to understand common trends, emotional motivators, and general likes and dislikes of your primary target; focus groups, which usually are the most expensive since skilled professionals are hired to evoke answers to questions that can range from specific to general; and surveys, which take longer to develop, are cheaper than other methods, and generally easier to administer and provide excellent information if the surveys are well constructed with thoughtful questions.
Surveys and qualitative discussions are simply post rationalizations, and, to really understand what is going on, scientists have to measure the brain directly. So researchers and marketers must measure both aspects of people's decisions, and that is where some of the tools from neuroscience, psychology and other allied fields can and do help. They can also provide this additional dimension of insight into people's more intuitive reactions that a self-report cannot. This unique revelation of the inner truth is in essence the 'Big Promise' of neuromarketing.
Moral and Ethical Issues:
So far, we have a clearer understanding of what the field of neuroscience can discover when applying cutting edge technology to a field infamous for their selling tactics. But what can we do when the lines become blurred in ethical and moral practices, especially in research that can make us feel vulnerable to persuasion? This is where we, as consumers, must be able to draw the line of invasive strategies that will affect us as well as our children. Critical ethical issues have also been raised by consumer groups, scientists, and scholars and have been largely ignored by the industry.
A 2012 survey conducted by Gallup ranked the advertising profession at the bottom of the honesty scale with only 11% of participants rating advertising practitioners with very high or high scores, barely above salespeople and lobbyists (Christopher Morin). Over the last fifty years, a complex set of laws combined with a general industry belief that ethics don’t matter in advertising have fostered the idea that the practice of advertising should evolve without strong government intervention. Furthermore, when the government does intervene, it faces fierce legal resistance from lobbying groups invoking the constitutional right of free speech. Commercial speech is indeed protected under the First Amendment as long as it does not distort or falsify advertising claims. In this context, the practice of deceptive advertising has flourished.
Brain Development in Children:
Insight into how a child’s brain develops in the form of anatomical growth and the correlation to cognitive development is one way to tie into the methods of neuromarketing to children. Francis Steen, a professor at UCLA states: “The human brain is not a finished organ at birth. In fact, another 10 or 12 years are needed before even a general development is completed. Structural maturation of individual brain regions and their connecting pathways is required for the successful development of cognitive, motor, and sensory functions.” He also goes on to explain that this maturation eventually provides for a smooth flow of neural impulses throughout the brain, which allows for information to be integrated across the many spatially segregated brain regions involved in these functions. Large groups of myelinated axons, which connect various regions in the brain, appear visibly as "white matter". Axons of the major pathways in the human brain, such as those of the corpus callosum (which connects the two halves of the brain) or the corticospinal tract (which connects the brain to the spinal cord and the rest of the body), continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Postmortem studies suggest that axon diameters and myelin sheaths undergo conspicuous growth during the first two years of life, but may not be fully mature before adolescence or even late adulthood. Normal white matter development is characterized by rapid changes through age 4-5 years, and the most striking change is due to myelination. This is usually when they first begin to retain permanent memories and distinguish, to some extent, the differences between advertisements and information.
Executive function is a set of mental processes that helps connect past experience with present action. People use it to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, as well as managing time and space.
T. S. Braver and colleagues have provided a theory of cognitive control that focuses on the role of context processing. According to their theory, an underlying context-processing mechanism is responsible for the cognitive control functions of attention, inhibition, and working memory. In the present study, the authors examined whether T. S. Braver et al.'s theory could account for developmental differences in cognitive control. The authors compared the performance of children with that of young adults on a continuous performance task that placed demands on context processing. The results suggested that developmental differences in the cognitive control functions of attention, inhibition, and working memory may be based on age-related changes in an underlying context-processing mechanism.
Results of the present study are consistent with the hypothesis that children and young adults differ in their ability to use context information to control. The results of non-target trials suggest that developmental differences in context processing may be responsible for age differences in two separate functions of cognitive control. In addition, the comparison of children and young adults in these trials indicate that developmental differences in context processing were also responsible for age differences in the cognitive control function of inhibition.
Hypothesis:
By understanding how the brain of a child develops, and studies that indicates the developmental differences in various ages, we can make a hypothetical conclusion that neuromarketing can and may have influential affects in children.
We see that executive functions in children can relate certain past memories with present action. If these marketing firms were to embed certain brands that correlate with a certain experiences as they grow, then the chances of them growing with that brand in mind can only lead to future sales. Since the growth of the brain usually does not reach its peak until late adolescents to early adulthood, it can be hypothesized that cognitive control functions such as inhibition, attention and memory can be tweaked by marketing firms to bombard a child’s brain with brands that can be subliminally embedded into their memory.
Due to the lack of findings performed on children by neuromarketing research companies, all we can do is hyothesize whether neuromarketing companies have made an acute or lasting effect on a child’s cognitive development. I believe that with time, we will be able to explore deeper into the minds of children as the technology in this sect continues to grow.
Conclusion:
From my own experiences, some of my fondest childhood memories were that of Curious George, and as a result, those memories of that stuffed monkey remained nostalgically. When some relevance to Curious George arises, either through conversation or the reimaged form of the shows, executive function brings me back to moments where I can remember those good times. Due to these reflections, it may urge me to reread the children’s story, watch the new cartoon shows, or in extreme “consumerism,” purchase merchandise. Some may consider this prudent planning by advertising firms in 1941; some may consider that due to the nostalgic value that it held for me, it was retained in my permanent memory which is considered to be the white matter of the brain. Regardless of how it is viewed, it has left a lasting impression on my childhood, which is what all marketing aspects desire to achieve.
Of course, these methods may be considered, by an overwhelming consensus among the scientific community, to be at its infancy stage of development. However, what can be understood by most economists is that this niche in marketing will be expanding as technology continues to grow. This is why it is both timely and critical that scholars and researchers continue to debate these ethical and legal issues so that future polices can be implemented as this sect of research continues to grow.

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