Branded brains

News from the neuroscientific edge of marketing: LA Times runs a piece (free reg. req'd) on recent research on how marketing may influence our brand preferences. That kind of research is about to answer a 'trillion-dollar question': why we choose what we choose, why we buy what we buy.

Here are a few highlights of the article:

1. Many seemingly rational decisions are reflexive snap judgements. Many of these decisions are actually driven by automatic processes that evolved to manage conflicts between sex, hunger, thirst and the other elemental appetites of survival.
2. Neurons are linked by pathways that, after being forged, are continually revised by experience. So important is experience that there's no way to separate the brain's neural structure from the influence of the world that surrounds it.
3. Marketing does more than change minds. It may alter the brain (that is, the way neurons connect and communicate, not any macroscopic features of the organ.)
4. The well-known preference for Coke when tested against other sodas (the 'Pepsi Challenge') is generated by Coke's activation of specific brain regions that deal with memory, likelihood of rewards and the sense of self. Basically, Coca-Cola activates structures that literally drive your behavior.
5. The application of neuroscience into marketing, brand development and product innovation raises some serious ethical issues. Consumer groups already asked the US Congress what would happen if corporate marketers and political consultants could trigger specific neural activity by various means so as to modify our behaviour and serve their own ends. Others worry that human personality is in danger of becoming nothing more than an accidental byproduct of biology, a patter of spots on a brain image.

And finally, the most important sentence of the whole article, a quote from one of the researchers:

We think there are branded brains.

You think about it, too. It's of critical importance to branding and it goes far, far beyond it.