Brain branding – brands on the brain
Steven Quartz and Anette AspSocial Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, United States
INTRODUCTION
Economies are increasingly characterized by a persistent over-supply of products and services and increasingly narrow quality differences among them. Faced with over 200 varieties of potato chips, entire aisles of breakfast cereals and shampoos, consumers are confronted with bewildering choices for which tangible distinctions are fewer and fewer. The result is a “paradox of choice” as psychologist Barry Schwartz dubs it (Schwartz, 2004), which floods the brain with hard-to-differentiate choices and simultaneously moves value away...