Neuromarketing: useful or useless?

Robin Wright argues that neuromarketing is useful to market research. Results from focus groups can be highly misleading, but within a couple of decades, brain scan research will have evolved to answer questions about brand empathy and brand learning from a communication just by studying mirror neurons in the brain.

Neuromarketing: useful or useless?

Robin Wight and Vincent Nolan

USEFUL, ARGUES ROBIN WIGHT

It is slightly over 40 years since I entered advertising as a fledgling copywriter. Much has changed since then, from the growth of the web to the explosion of mobile phones.

What hasn't changed, (and that ought to be ringing alarm bells throughout our industry), is the way we measure advertising communication. Good old focus groups and quantitative research, tracking conscious minds, still keep the likes of Millward Brown fat and purring.

Focus groups, in case you've forgotten, were called that because they were meant...

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