Mashup: Neuromarketing and Web Analytics

I love the smell of libraries. The muted tones of a library. The prehistoric librarian sitting behind the desk who types with a pencil eraser.

All these things lead me to ease up on purchasing books and borrowing them instead. Anyway I tend to read books in less than the 28 day borrowing policy, so we're covered in that area.

The booklist this month centers around my recent interest in Neuromarketing. This field melds scientific data with known customer behavior models. Why it interests me is it bissects the field of Web Analytics. Click here for the Wikipedia def of this field.

The books I'm currently perusing:
-The Secret of Scent, by Luca Terin
-Why Choose This Book? by Read Montague
-The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other stories, by Oliver Sacks
-Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
-Neurosciencemarketing.com blog

Why Neuromarketing??
I hit a chord in my brianiac side when I learned about the following true story:

The collision of Neuroscience and Marketing was brought to the masses in 2004 when Read Montague, coined the father of this field, gave a blind Coke and Pepsi test to test subjects. His experiment first tested their taste receptors for the ability to differentiate between Pepsi and Coke. He hooked his subjects up to fMRI machines and the results showed that his subjects' brain patterns were similar when tasting Coke and Pepsi, and that his subjects' preferences were about equal for Pepsi and Coke. However, when he primed his subjects with the brand of the soda they were about to taste test, their brain activity showed that their emotional response was the main indicator of which brand they ultimately chose as their favorite. That's why Coke won out hands down. Most of the subjects' first memorable experience was with Coke and knowing that their sip was of Coke triggered their "preference computation" to choose Coke as the winner in the taste category.

This excites me. I can't say how many times my facebook profile has said "in retail therapy" because there really is a mental high that I experience from buying something for myself. It's also stunning to know that especially in the online experience, we can hone in on our customer's preferences by testing which factors will trigger the emotional reaction that causes their "preference computation" to purchase a product. Will it be the color of the background in the product image? Will it be how the products are displayed on the Category pages? Or can it be as simple as the type of font you choose to display the prices of your product?

The invention of the functional MRIessentially made this field possible to study on a larger scale.
Functional MRIs run off the traditional MRI machine, but scan the brain at low resolutions but at a faster rate. Thus it can tell with good accuracy when neural activity increases or decreases in specific areas of the brain. So you can run through a set of 5 photos of a particular product taken from different angles and let the fMRI tell you which one activates the most emotional part of the brain, which may indicate which shot to use when persuading your customers down the conversion funnel.

Personally, I find that the fMRI methodology could be intrusive and can change the results of the experiment. If you can picture yourself in an MRI machine, or have actually had an MRI done before, you know the kind of claustrophobic environment you are subjected to. In this kind of closed quarters, I'm sure that my brain is upset by the claustrophobic environment I'm in and can't fully focus on the task at hand. I'd like to see a more practical neural activity scanning machine, maybe a hat? that can do this type of task and report back equally precise amounts of data as the fMRI machine.

Good stuff, right? I'm pushing pieces from Web Analytics and Neuromarketing together to see where they would fit.