Advertising: Can A Strong Brand Image Press The "Buy Button" In The Consumer?
By Sanjay Sharma, Section News
Posted on Tue Oct 19, 2004 at 10:57:36 PM EST
A study, published in the Oct. 14, 2004 issue of the journal Neuron, is the first to explore how cultural messages penetrate the human brain and shape personal preferences. The study showed that some people did not choose a drink based on taste alone, Dr. Montague said. They chose a drink plus what it conjured up to their medial prefrontal cortex, namely the strong brand identity of Coca-Cola, he said. At issue is whether marketers can exploit advances in brain science to make more effective commercials. Is there a "buy button" in the brain?
- When researchers monitored brain scans of 67 people who were given a blind taste test of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, each soft drink lit up the brain's reward system, and the participants were evenly split as to which drink they preferred.
- But when the same people were told what they were drinking, activity in a different set of brain regions linked to brand loyalty overrode their original preferences. Three out of four said that they preferred Coca-Cola.
Dr. P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who led the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi study, said he was fascinated by the way cultural images insinuated their way into people's choices. The study of Coke and Pepsi, financed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Kane Family Foundation, showed that two different brain systems were at play.
- When subjects used their sense of taste alone to choose a preferred drink, an area of the brain called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex lit up.
- When told they were drinking "the real thing," as Coke is widely known, a memory region call the hippocampus and another part of the prefrontal cortex lit up.
Circulating in draft form over the last year, the study has been widely discussed by neuroscientists and advertisers, as well as people who worry about the power of commercials in determining consumer behavior.
NEWS
TECH
NEWS 
FREE
STUFF 
BLOGGING
PROJECTS