Neuromarketing et éthique

For marketing managers, everything has always turned around two obsessions: entering your mind to know your thoughts and then activate the button that will make you buy. They ask themselves about what should the do to make their product forbid, that their brand remains etched in the memory of consumers and how to act on their buying behavior.

Over time, traditional market research, questionnaires, surveys, focus groups have shown their limits. It is known that 80% to 90% of the products launched on the market fail within the first year. Yet there were studies prior to their launch… So there is a gap between what people say and what people do. The questionnaires are biased, thereby just asking the question is making the answer wrong. Focus groups can be completely "swallowed up" by a character who would take power over others with a mental point of view or because of his strong personality.

Psychosocial and neurologists have studied the issue and their answer is clear: consumers are not telling the truth. But we can wonder: why? Because if we really look at how our decisions are made, there is a great deal of emotion. We are irrational, 85% of our actions are deeply irrational.

So how to measure reliably and objectively the impact of advertising, trademark or a commercial?

Between 1970 and 1980, Pespi led a series of campaigns showing consumers (making a blind test) their drinking compared to that of the market leader Coca-Cola. Pepsi emerged largely victorious from such tests.

In 2003, Read Montague (an American neuroscientist) remembered these tests and wondered why if people gave preference to Pepsi in blind tests, the mark does not dominate the market. He repeated the same tests and found that if people preferred Pepsi when the tasting was blind, the results were diametrically opposed when the testers were aware of the brand of the drink they were enjoying. But how can we explain this change in opinion? This is where Read Montague had a simple but brilliant idea: He repeated the experiment by putting the consumers in an MRI scanner. And then he could see that the two tests did not stimulate the same areas in the brain testers. We will talk about it further in details. When you or I think of Coca-Cola, all the branding done around it changes our choice and preference as consumers.

This result laid the foundation for a new field of research: the NEUROMARKETING, the study of brain responses to advertisements, brands and messages that are part of the cultural landscape.

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