October 26, 2003

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex

By Clive Thompson









When we reached the M.R.I. control room, Clint Kilts, the scientific director of the BrightHouse Institute, was fiddling away at a computer keyboard. A professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, Kilts began working with Meaux in 2001. Meaux had learned that Kilts and a group of marketers were founding the BrightHouse Institute, and she joined their team, becoming perhaps the world's first full-time neuromarketer. Kilts is confident that there will soon be room for other full-time careers in neuromarketing. ''You will actually see this being part of the decision-making process, up and down the company,'' he predicted. ''You are going to see more large companies that will have neuroscience divisions.''

The BrightHouse Institute's techniques are based, in part, on an experiment that Kilts conducted earlier this year. He gathered a group of test subjects and asked them to look at a series of commercial products, rating how strongly they liked or disliked them. Then, while scanning their brains in an M.R.I. machine, he showed them pictures of the products again. When Kilts looked at the images of their brains, 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.


This result provided the BrightHouse Institute with an elegant tool for testing marketing campaigns and brands. An immediate, intuitive bond between consumer and product is one that every company dreams of making. ''If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger gestalt of who you self-attribute as,'' Kilts said, using psychology-speak. ''You're a Chevy guy.'' With the help of neuromarketers, he claims, companies can now know with certainty whether their products are making that special connection.

To demonstrate their technique, Kilts and Meaux offered to stick my head in the M.R.I. machine. They laid me down headfirst in the coffinlike cylinder and scurried out to the observation room. ''Here's what I want you to do,'' Meaux said, her voice crackling over an intercom. ''I'm going to show you a bunch of images of products and activities -- and I want you to picture yourself using them. Don't think about whether you like them or not. Just put yourself in the scene.''

I peered up into a mirror positioned over my head, and she began flashing pictures. There were images of a Hummer, a mountain bike, a can of Pepsi. Then a Lincoln Navigator, Martha Stewart, a game of basketball and dozens more snapshots of everyday consumption. I imagined piloting the Hummer off-road, playing a game of pickup basketball, swigging the Pepsi. (I was less sure what to do with Martha Stewart.)

After about 15 minutes, Kilts pulled me out, and I joined him at a bank of computers. ''Look here,'' he said, pointing to a screen that showed an image of a brain in cross sections. He pointed to a bright yellow spot on the right side, in the somatosensory cortex, an area that shows activity when you emulate sensory experience -- as when I imagined what it would be like to drive a Hummer. If a marketer finds that his product is producing a response in this region of the brain, he can conclude that he has not made the immediate, instinctive sell: even if a consumer has a positive attitude toward the product, if he has to mentally ''try it out,'' he isn't instantly identifying with it.

Kilts stabbed his finger at another glowing yellow dot near the top of the brain. It was the magic spot -- the medial prefrontal cortex. If that area is firing, a consumer isn't deliberating, he said: he's itching to buy. ''At that point, it's intuitive. You say: 'I'm going to do it. I want it.' ''

THE CONSUMING PUBLIC has long had an uneasy feeling about scientists who dabble in marketing. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote ''The Hidden Persuaders,'' a book about marketing that featured harsh criticism of ''psychology professors turned merchandisers.'' Marketers, Packard worried, were using the resources of the social sciences to understand consumers' irrational and emotional urges -- the better to trick them into increased product consumption. In rabble-rousing prose, Packard warned about subliminal advertising and cited a famous (though, it turned out, bogus) study about a movie theater that inserted into a film several split-second frames urging patrons to drink Coke.

In truth, marketers only wish they had that much control. If anything, corporations tend to look slightly askance at their admen, because there's not much convincing evidence that advertising works as well as promised. John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th century, famously quipped that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but that he didn't know which half. In their quest for a more respectable methodology -- or perhaps more important, the appearance of one -- admen have plundered one scientific technique after another. Demographic studies have profiled customers by analyzing their age, race or neighborhood; telephone surveys have queried semi-randomly selected strangers to see how the public at large viewed a company's product.

Advertising's main tool, of course, has been the focus group, a classic technique of social science. Marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds. Joey Reiman is the C.E.O. of BrightHouse, an Atlanta marketing firm, and a founding partner in the BrightHouse Institute; over years of producing marketing concepts for companies like Coca-Cola and Red Lobster, he has come to the conclusion that focus groups are ultimately less about gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete justifications for a hugely expensive ad campaign. ''The sad fact is, people tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think,'' he says. ''Sometimes there's a focus-group bully, a loudmouth who's so insistent about his opinion that it influences everyone else. This is not a science; it's a circus.''

In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''

Other neuromarketers have demonstrated that we react to products in ways that we may not be entirely conscious of. This year, for instance, scientists working with DaimlerChrysler scanned the brains of a number of men as they looked at pictures of cars and rated them for attractiveness. The scientists found that the most popular vehicles -- the Porsche- and Ferrari-style sports cars -- triggered activity in a section of the brain called the fusiform face area, which governs facial recognition. ''They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars,'' says Henrik Walter, a psychiatrist at the University of Ulm in Germany who ran the study. ''The lights of the cars look a little like eyes.''

Neuromarketing may also be able to suss out the distinction between advertisements that people merely like and those that are actually effective -- a difference that can be hard to detect from a focus group. A neuromarketing study in Australia, for instance, demonstrated that supershort, MTV-style jump cuts -- indeed, any scenes shorter than two seconds -- aren't as likely to enter the long-term memory of viewers, however bracing or aesthetically pleasing they may be.



Clive Thompson writes frequently about science and technology. His most recent article for the magazine was about the future of kitchen tools
