• DOI:10.1038/nn1004-1015
• Corpus ID: 5158938

Brain scam?

@article{Brammer2004BrainS,
  title={Brain scam?},
  author={Michael Brammer},
  journal={Nature Neuroscience},
  year={2004},
  volume={7},
  pages={1015-1015}
}

• Michael Brammer
• Published 2004
• Medicine
• Nature Neuroscience

S ellers have always spent a great deal of time, money and energy trying to find ways to influence buyers' decisions. Now, thanks in part to the increasing accessibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), marketing executives are hoping to use neu-roscience to design better selling techniques. If the media hype is to be believed, then fMRI is being exploited by savvy consulting companies intent on finding 'the buy button in the brain' , and is on the verge of creating advertising campaigns that we will be unable to resist. A more skeptical view of neuromarketing is that cognitive scientists , many of whom watched from the sidelines as their molecular colleagues got rich, are now jumping on the commercial bandwagon. According to this view, neuromarketing is little more than a new fad, exploited by scientists and marketing consultants to blind corporate clients with science. What is the science behind all this fuss? In one widely discussed (but still unpublished) study, Read Montague, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, used fMRI to study cola preferences. Montague found that when subjects rated Pepsi or Coke in a blind test, activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex correlated with their stated preferences. However, if subjects were told that one of the samples was Coke, they were more likely to prefer it, and this change in preference was accompanied by increased activity in other brain areas thought to be involved in reward. When the sample was identified as Pepsi rather than Coke, however, this produced neither a behavioral shift nor a change in brain activity. These results have been interpreted as reflecting neural correlates of Coca-Cola's brand effect, which, as marketers know, can powerfully affect consumer choice. In another experiment, sponsored by carmaker DaimlerChrysler at the University Clinic of Ulm, Germany, researchers used fMRI to scan men as they looked at pictures of cars and rated their attractiveness Predictably, the subjects were more attracted to sports cars than to limousines or small cars, and the sports cars elicited greater activity in brain reward areas. Other groups are applying similar techniques to movies and even political advertisements; for example, another unpublished study at the University of California, Los Angeles recently reported that Democrats and Republicans differ in their neural responses to campaign commercials showing images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It should come as no surprise that some companies have seen a business …