Briefs

By Anna Papadopoulos, The ClickZ Network, Dec 3, 2008

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. --H.P. Lovecraft

Tell your 18-year-old niece who wants to get into advertising to skip the media and communications degree and study science and math instead. In last month's column, I briefly mentioned "BusinessWeek" senior writer Stephen Baker's new book, "The Numerati," which introduces us to the mathematical gurus who are creating predictive algorithms to decipher our next move based on our data trail. It's not hard to imagine, considering everything we do can be traced back to some electronic data pool that includes our credit card purchases, cell phone bills, and online browsing behavior. Someone once told me that if I wanted to understand a person's values, all I needed to do was examine her credit card purchases. Try it with your own credit card statements, and see what you uncover about yourself.

Now another interesting book has come out that has convinced me that I need to go back to school. "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy," by marketing wizard (and former ClickZ columnist) Martin Lindstrom, is based on a research project that Lindstrom conducted over three years. Lindstrom and his team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) technology to understand what happens in consumers' brains as they are exposed to advertising and specific brands. This research falls under a body of marketing called neuromarketing.

"Neuromarketing," a term coined by market research professor Ale Smidts in 2002, refers to a new field of marketing that explores consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. According to Wikipedia's description of neuromarketing:

Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one's physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

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