About us Research tools Services Testing Contact Hatched in the late 1990s by Gerald Zaltman of Harvard University, the pioneering field of “neuromarketing” attempts to  decipher what pushes customers’ purchasing decisions using neuroimaging scientific tools. Researchers show products, ads,  and other marketing materials to participants, and then study the lines on the EEG or watch brain blood flow patterns on MRI  images. Besides MRI and EEG, neuromarketing uses also magnetoencephalography (MEG), transcranial magnetic  stimulation (TMS) and other performance tasks built as software applications (e.g. ConsumerBrain).  Neuromarketing made a national news splash in USA in 2003, when Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine in  Houston, Texas, used functional MRI (fMRI) technology to explain a famous Coke-Pepsi conundrum: the two sodas are very  similar in chemical composition and there’s little difference in taste, yet Coke maintains its market dominance. Montague and  colleagues found that, both in blind taste tests and in fMRI scans of a brain region associated with taste, subjects were evenly  divided in their preference for the two brands, they even preferred a bit more Pepsi. But when Montague’s subjects knew they  were drinking Coke, brain centers linked to emotion and cognitive control were disproportionately stimulated - which  suggested that the powerful cultural wallop of the Coke brand can override the taste buds.  Many of the top companies are now using neuromarketing: Pepsi, Procter&Gamble, Mercedes, Google, Yahoo,  Microsoft, Hyundai, Danone, etc. Neuromarketing applications (using fMRI and other specialized tools) can potentially enter  into the marketing cycle in several places. In the first, it can be used as part of the design process itself. Here, neural  responses could be used to test and refine the product before it is released. For example, the use of neuromarketing by  commercial manufacturers to design a more appealing food product is both feasible and likely. For this to work, one would  need to identify which dimension of gustation is to be studied (taste, odour or texture) and analyze brain responses to  variations in that dimension. In the second place, it can be used after the product is fully designed, typically to measure neural  responses as part of an advertising campaign to increase sales. In entertainment industry for example, it was revealed that  the ability to recall narrative content of the TV sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm three weeks later was correlated with the  strength of hippocampus and temporal lobe responses during viewing, indicating the impact of the movie. Not last, it can be  used for segmentation purposes, by grouping consumers based on similar purchasing drivers and not just solely on socio-  demographic factors as it is traditionally done.  If we take neuromarketing as the examination of the neural activities that underlie the daily activities related to people,  products and marketing, this could be the most useful and interesting bridge between academic research and practical  applications into business, providing critical inputs to marketers and decision makers.  ConsumerBrain © 2011 Designed by oGRe 2011 Neuromarketing