The future is usually hazy for me. I wasn’t impressed when first introduced to the Macintosh II in 1988, figuring the computer would take its place beside the waxer as a pasteup tool. I didn’t predict my wife would be upset when I forgot her birthday. But it was clear to me that neuromarketing would be big.

The question is whether we will expect too much of it. I was reminded of this just this morning while listening to “NPR’s ‘Mozart Effect’ Was Just What We Wanted To Hear.” The piece talks about the parenting movement spawned by psychologist Francis Rausher’s study indicating that students who had listened to a Mozart sonata scored higher on a spacial-temporal task. A cottage industry of Mozart CDs for young ones sprang up, and states like Georgia and Tennessee started giving out free CDs to every baby.

Then came the backlash when our children’s intelligence failed to improve overnight.

But the original study promised nothing of the sort. Rauscher had simply made a modest finding within a certain set of parameters. The media and self-proclaimed experts wanted it to be more than it was. And, of course, we parents wanted it to be more as well. Who doesn’t want a smarter kid? My mom still does.

And who doesn’t want smarter marketing? The key is to not run wild with a one modest study, even–or especially– if it seems to reinforce what you want in the first place (confirmation bias strikes again). This is the biggest concern of neuroscientists: that marketers will abuse scientific findings. The Mozart effect story is a reminder for us to use and triangulate multiple data sources.

Or just forge ahead, and deal with the backlash later. At least you might sell a few books and CDs.

Interested in viewing our neuromarketing presentation from last week’s Communication and Leadership Conference at Western New England College? Download the PDF or view it online at Slideshare. Thanks again to Jennifer Williams of Verilliance for being the perfect co-presenter.

Neuromarketing works best when cross-referenced with other research.

When I was in the Peace Corps, our bible, so to speak,was Where There is No Doctor, the most widely used health-education book in tropical and subtropical countries. (It’s been translated into more than 100 languages!)

This testament to better health provides valuable advice, such as: if a variety of people give the same indigenous cure for something, the cure works. But if a variety of people provide different cures, nobody knows the answer.

I love this and believe that it applies to everything. What is God? (No agreement) What happens after death? (No agreement) What is the best way to package soup? (Agreement! Read below.)

This approach actually has a name in research, where it is referred to as triangulation. Triangulation is the idea that you can be more confident about a result if different research methods lead to the same result.

And triangulation provides the best way to apply neuroscience to marketing.

About a month ago, Campbell’s made neuromarketing news with an article in the Wall Street Journal (note: readers can see only the lead two graphs without subscribing). The piece chronicled how Campbell’s had employed neuromarketing research in redesigning their iconic soup-can labels. It was reported that Campbell’s made major marketing decisions based on biometrics—measuring where subjects’ eyes focused, changes in their heart rates, skin moisture, and so on.

The article itself became a news story—at least in the Twitter and blogging world—because of what it implied. Critics decried the firm’s supposed reliance on neuromarketing, which some called pseudoscience, and the study’s small sample-group size: forty. Was Campbell’s insane to make such major marketing decisions based on such limited research?

A week later, neuromarketing blogger Jennifer Williams provided an intelligent analysis of the situation in Fast Company. Williams spent time digging a little deeper into the work that Campbell’s had done over the past two years, revealing that the company was not as suicidal as it might have first appeared.

Campbell’s research was actually quite extensive. It involved more than 1,500 subjects, and they brought in several companies to conduct different types of analysis at various points in the process. Campbell’s was not insane, unless by insane you mean insanely smart. Williams’s article cooled the debate, and helped put neuromarketing in perspective.

Specifically, I mean that neuromarketing is best used as one of several research methods, whose results can be compared to one another. This is what Campbell’s did when they “triangulated” their research, as Williams noted.

Neuromarketing may be the most remarkable tool to grace marketing’s toolbox in generations, but it is not a magic bullet (well, not yet). Use it wisely: cross-reference it.

Better market research through neuroscience. And the one number that will never change.

Try as we might, marketing is still more a guessing game than anybody wants. Eighty percent of new products and services fail within their first six months. Most Hollywood films and TV pilots fail. And that includes those that were vetted by focus groups. “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative,” writes Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman. That’s why, although focus groups are good at identifying attitudes, they suck at predicting behavior.

The reasons for this are many, and include group dynamics, incentives, and the fact that focus groups do not mimic the real world. One of the biggest reasons, though, Zaltman adds, is that most of our decision-making happens on an unconscious level—far from the conscious explanations the focus-group leaders gather.

But here comes neuromarketing, or the application of neuroscience’s observations and discoveries of how the mind works and what that means to marketing (and branding). With neuroscience, we’re taking baby steps toward understanding how what happens on the unconscious level influences what we decide to buy. Neuromarketing is not perfect and it is expensive, but larger companies are moving toward it. And why not? Mammoth failures like New Coke and the DeLorean car—which relied on traditional marketing— show that even the big boys fall on their faces.

With the phenomenal growth in the past decade of neuroscience and its analytic tools, there is finally a chance for agencies to provide less subjective opinions, and more proof that what they offer is worth the expense.

And the growth of neuromarketing is happening fast. It was only seven years ago that a neuroscience firm—Brighthouse Institute—could claim having a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. Now companies are measuring more than brains. Coke is starting to grade its marketing agencies based on four criteria, including sales and market-share gains. Procter & Gamble is testing a similar approach. Many observers expect this Darwinian model to be the wave of the future, at least for the big boys.

In my opinion, though, even this better-marketing-through-science approach will never improve the overall failure rate for products and services. That is because success, by definition, will always be the minority. It is no coincidence that we talk about an 80 percent failure rate for products and services; we use the same percentage when talking about business failures. (Eighty percent of new businesses fail within the first year.) We may argue over the reasons and offer improvements, but the number will always stay the same.

But this doesn’t mean you throw in the towel. After all, 20 percent of you already embrace change and improvements in your marketing, and neuroscience will increasingly be one of those things. But what about the not-so-big boys who can’t afford neuroscience methods and other neuroscience tools? What does all this mean for us?

Read
There is a host of excellent books on the burgeoning field of neuromarketing. See this blog’s bookshelf for titles and authors, and visit other blogs on the subject, especially Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing.

Collaborate Wisely
Collaborate with a marketing agency that is familiar with neuromarketing and what it can contribute to understanding your customers better.

Work
Neuroscience will offer incredible insights, but no panacea and no short cuts. The information you have available to you is available to all. It is just a matter of who works hardest to use it best.