“Neuromarketing.”  Have you heard the term before?  It caught my attention today in an article found in Advertising Age.  Admittedly, I hadn’t heard a lot about it, but after reading the article, I googled neuromarketing, and lo and behold, there’s a lot of information out there!  Basically, it’s a new trend in marketing that measures a person’s brain responses to advertising and marketing through MRI’s and EEG’s.  Some other good articles from PBS’s “Frontline” and Time magazine can be found here and here, respectively.

Studying the brain’s response to environmental stimuli isn’t new – scientists have been studying things like our response to music, stress, art and many others for years.  You  may recall a presentation given at UNMC last September by Dr. Daniel Levitin about the effect of music on the brain. But our response specifically to advertising and brands hasn’t really been studied much until recent years, and is still in its infancy.  And while it appears that more and more studies are being done, marketers aren’t doing a whole lot with that information for the time being. 

Is this the way of future market research?  Only time will tell.  But it certainly gives a new meaning to the term, “picking your brain.”