art not ads

Mindhacks briefly reports on recent studies in neuromarketing, the latest back-room fad in the struggle to gain a competitive edge in marketing and advertising. From the neuromarketing article on Wikipedia:

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in ones physiological state (Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, Galvanic Skin Response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

As Mindhacks points out:

if you read the newspaper articles [one in the NY Times and one in the Guardian] it’s shocking to compare their grandiose claims with this study which is currently the best ‘neuromarketing’ evidence

In other words, the marketers are marketing their own research tools — whether they work or not — both to the world and seemingly even to themselves. This smacks of pseudoscience. The usual process is bad enough: when the experimental results don’t match the desired outcome, research tends to be suppressed. But this is even worse. When the research methodology is marketed instead of its actual results, the cart is well and truly put before the horse.