Oh dear—they are at it again. The brain scanners, that is. An article published on Tuesday (11/28) in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the use of MRI to gauge consumer response eliminates the risk of dishonest or incomplete answers in market surveys. While it’s true that we cannot control our brain activity in response to a stimulus – so brain response cannot “lie”– the results of brain scanning are definitely open to interpretation and the risk of being misconstrued.
The article reports on research conducted by Christine Born, a German radiologist, which was presented at the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago on November 28th. The results of the research, reported to be the first to use magnetic resonance imaging to study brand recognition, showed that big, well-known brands evoke stronger brain response than lesser-known brands.
MSNBC reports the main findings as follows: (click here for full article)
The volunteers’ brains indeed reacted similarly to well-known brands, the researchers found, with activity localized in parts of the brain involved in self-identification, rewards and positive emotion. This suggests, Born said, that the stronger brands were ‘more fixed in the brain’ and ‘perceived more easily.’
But for the “weak” brands, activation was diffused across the brain to a greater degree, and brain activity was stronger overall, suggesting that the brain spent more energy recognizing these brands. Weak brands also produced more activation on the right side of the brain, which Born says is involved with ‘more negative emotional input and conflict-solving strategies.’
These findings are consistent with the conclusion reached by Graham Page and Jane Raymond in their recent paper (see post), that the brain forms representations more easily for strong brands than for weak ones. What the findings do not support is Ms. Born’s assertion that using MRI to measure brain response eliminates the risk of dishonest or incomplete answers. As justification of this statement in the Wall Street Journal she cites an informal experiment as follows:
“…she asked a student to name his favorite brand of sneakers, and he said Adidas. But under MRI, the Puma brand evoked a more positive response, and the student admitted that his favorite shoe was a Puma model that was out of his price range.”
The implication is that the student’s initial response was incorrect. But did he lie or misrepresent his preference? No, he simply responded to the question with a sensible answer which was bounded by the practical aspect of what he could reasonably afford. If Ms. Born had asked which brand he would buy if money were no object, he probably would have named Puma.
Similarly, if you asked me today what car I would buy next, I would answer Audi. That does not stop my pulse from racing when I see someone driving a Ferrari. I am sure my brain activity surges, too. The question becomes, is that response envy, lust or excitement? You have no clue unless you ask me. The only way researchers can understand the response of different parts of the brain to different stimuli is to use controlled experiments and ask follow-up questions. Only once we have done this will we be able to assess the value and implications of brain response measurement to the practice of market research.
Brain response experiments like this one have the potential to extend our knowledge of how and why people react to brands the way they do, but please—let’s not get carried away by sexy science. We have a long way to go before brain response becomes even a useful adjunct to traditional techniques, let alone a replacement.
(20 votes, average: 3.35 out of 5)
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December 4th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Whazzup Nigel!
Well, let me share the results of a simple experiment we conducted down here. Instead of using fMRI to gauge the intensity of emotional responses to brands, we asked the simple question: “Which of these brands do you love/hate the most?”
Not surprisingly, three times more Mexicans love Coke than Pepsi and fifteen times more than Big Cola. Big Cola is hated by three times as many who love it, while Coke is loved by eight times more people who hate it.
This is very similar to Dr. Born’s conclusion that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in our brains. Of course, it’s faster, cheaper and less intrusive to people.
Cheers!
December 5th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Howdy Jorge,
I think your comment highlights the key issue of all the behavioral measures that are available to researchers - facial movement, heart rate, galvanic skin response, brain response, etc. - what can they add to our understanding of how people respond to brands and marketing communication?
In many cases I suspect that they will validate the simple and traditional approach of asking questions. In others they may give us additional insight into the initial, instinctive response to a stimulus. This would allow us to compare the mediated, conscious response to the initial reaction and better understand the degree to which one or the other is important to decision making. This would be most useful with “sensitive” subjects about which respondents might consciously tone down or adapt their responses. It seems less likely that it would be useful when judging the attractiveness of soft drink brands!
Hasta luego, Nigel.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:36 am
Hi Nigel,
I think the problem with using MRI to gauge people’s response to brands is that there are too many factors determining the attractiveness of a brand.
Hence, it might be overly simplistic and uneconomical to look at MRI results, since the method does not elicit as a rich story for the brand as compared to other traditional methods. While it eliminates the issue of inaccuracy of response, the tradeoff appears to be much larger, unless of course the brand or topic in question has a great likelihood of social desirability bias (such as condoms, drugs etc.).
Nonetheless, as a qualification, I think all Dr Born’s study has done is to validate an intuitive hypothesis, that there is a correlation between differential brain activity and the size of a brand. How much this goes to say more about the status of a brand remains to be seen.
My 2-cents worth.
December 7th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Thanks for the 2 cents, Debbie, I think that you are right on the money. Brain response measurement like this might more accurately measure how quickly the mind builds a construct related to the brand and how strong that construct might be, but will it really tell us anything new and different? Given the amount of activity in this area I guess we will have some real answers before too long.