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Enter any grocery store and, like it or not, endless choice is yours–a
baffling array of toothpastes; shampoos for every state and stage
of human hair; paper towels that are eco-friendly, flowery, or thick
and brawny; soups that are healthy, homemade, meaty, or manly. Car
lots stretch for miles with choices in every size, style, color,
and combination. Shirts from L.L. Bean come in hundreds of colors,
fabrics, patterns, weights, and styles. Short of keeping our noses
in a copy of Consumer Reports, how do we decide?
We’re
able to quickly sort through the confusion by focusing on preferences
that we feel reflect our own identity, says Emory psychiatry professor
Clint Kilts. Businesses usually approach consumers assuming that
the objective physical properties of a particular product are what
drive decisions, but the resolution to buy is really based on more
subtle motivators related to preference, he explains. Preferences
dominate most of the choices we make in life. We may have a nostalgic
preference for a taste we developed as a child or a social, cultural,
or age-related preference. And preferences are a handy way to economize
our behavior so that we make it home from the store in time to eat
before midnight.
Kilts has scientific evidence to back
up his theories. He has spent years studying the brain’s response
to rewards and punishment, specifically its functioning in people
with addictions or other cognitive diseases and disorders. And he
sometimes uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view
the physical manifestations of cognition. Unlike conventional MRI,
which is a more static image of the body’s anatomy, fMRI can
highlight subtle changes in the brain during different disease states
and also the changes that correspond to various thoughts and emotions.
While collaborating on a study with
Rick Gilkey, a Goizueta Business School professor with an adjunct
appointment in psychiatry, he became fascinated with the negative
reactions that consumers often have to business and advertising
and the idea that business has not done a particularly good job
of interfacing with its consuming public. |
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As a scientist, Kilts is accustomed
to educating himself about a particular problem, forming a hypothesis,
and then devising experiments to test it. He discovered that in
business, however, decisions often are based on very little information,
derived unscientifically, that is then accepted as dogma. Major
advertising decisions often are decided by focus groups or market
surveys that are inherently biased and flawed. It seemed that business
was seeking a methodology to support its decisions but had not found
one that reflected the reality of the consumer’s decision-making
process. Along with longtime Atlanta advertising executive Joey
Reimann, also a Goizueta adjunct professor, Kilts helped found BrightHouse,
a company based on the belief that industries could improve their
inadequate understanding of consumer behavior through a scientific
approach.
As the company’s scientific
director and an expert in the field of imaging, he wanted to integrate
the advanced capabilities of functional neuroimaging with business
theory to help corporations get more in touch, in a very broad sense,
with their consumers’ psyches.
This idea didn’t sit well, however,
with some consumer advocacy groups, who felt that shoppers’
psyches should remain untouched.
Last December, Emory University President
James Wagner received an angry letter from Gary Ruskin, executive
director of the consumer watchdog group, Commercial Alert, accusing
Emory faculty of using imaging equipment intended for patient care
to further the marketing aims of corporations. The group also posted
the letter and a press release on its website. Emory scientists,
it said, were finding “new ways to subjugate the mind and
manipulate it for commercial gain.”
Rather than reporting from firsthand
knowledge, however, the organization was responding to an October
26, 2003, article in the New York Times entitled “There’s
a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex” that described
“neuromarketing” research at several different institutions,
including Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Business School, and
Emory University.
A separate article in Forbes magazine
characterized the research aims at finding “a ‘buy button’
inside the skull.” And the Times story hailed the neuroscience
wing at Emory University Hospital as “the epicenter of the
neuromarketing world.”
That last description turned out to
be a bit of an exaggeration, given that the research in question
was Kilts’ single neuroimaging study, conducted in 13 adult
volunteers and funded by a $4,800 grant from BrightHouse.
BrightHouse agreed to conduct the
study for a Fortune 500 client to help determine the neurologic
basis for what drives consumers’ choices. In other words,
how is the brain actually functioning when an individual is making
decisions and expressing preferences? Kilts and Gilkey recruited
volunteers for the study and presented them with an array of pictures
of 100 objects grouped into categories, such as fruits and vegetables,
cars, dogs, celebrities, etc., and asked them to rate their preferences
from –5 to +5, from strong dislike to strong like. Then, while
using fMRI technology to scan the participants’ brains, they
presented pictures of objects in the extreme positive and negative
ranges.
The researchers found that positive
and negative preferences are expressed within two distinct areas
of the brain. As the volunteers viewed pictures of objects they
strongly preferred, areas of the brain associated with reward processing
became involved. The mere image of a prized object such as a shiny
SUV or a home-grown tomato could cause this section to light up
on the MRI. Preferred objects also consistently activated a part
of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, which scientists
already had associated with a person’s sense of self. |
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Although
at first Kilts was surprised to see this self-referential area activated,
it helped explain why people are so adamant about protecting their
own personal preferences and denigrating the competition. “Certain
preferred products become part of the repository of our knowledge
of self,” he says. "Defending your preference is like
defending yourself. For instance, if your Chevy truck is a +5 to
you in terms of preference, you may go out of your way to find somebody
to argue with about how their Ford truck is garbage. A person with
a very strong preference for jazz might abhor other kinds of music
and make an argument that blues is ill-formed and primitive.”
The desire to strongly defend self-referential preferences extends
to sports teams, clothing, and even barbecue.
“This could mean a lot for companies,”
Kilts says. “It means understanding the concept of brand loyalty.
Companies bombard us with products and messages and associations
to try and make us aware of the physical characteristics of products.
That is an inefficient way of trying to make us develop brand loyalty.”
Consumers, on the other hand, are
making decisions based on a positive preference that reflects a
holistic representation of a company or product. If we identify
with a product, we are really identifying with that company, Kilts
says.
Asked about the Commercial Alert allegations,
Kilts believes the group did not take the time to find out what
his research was all about.
“Their criticism that we were
trying to find a ‘buy button’ really galvanized my belief
that the public has a great cynicism about business and a real fear
of it,” says Kilts. “They don’t see business as
being in any way a cooperative member of society. Even though business
has gone out of its way to deserve this skepticism, I think this
is counterproductive for our society and for our economy. Because
our lives are supported by occupations, everything would be better
if businesses were more aware of what consumers really want.”
Kilts also disliked having the term
“neuromarketing” applied to his research. “We
were never interested in putting people in a machine and having
them taste this candy bar versus that candy bar, then showing them
an advertisement and having them re-taste the candy bar,”
he explains.
“We haven’t learned enough
about the brain to be able to interpret those kinds of studies.
And a ‘buy button’ doesn’t exist, because we take
pride in our right to self-determination. We are not going to find
this neural area and then give big business a code they can play
on the radio and we all march like automatons down to the store
to buy a particular product. That shows a real lack of understanding
of how people decide what to do. We believed the real way to educate
business would be not to change the behavior of the consumer, but
to change the behavior of companies. Businesses could better profit
through a closer and more understanding relationship with the consumer.”
Kilts is no longer involved with BrightHouse,
but he and other faculty members in psychiatry continue to use functional
imaging to study the neurologic basis for both positive and negative
social behaviors, including altruism, cooperation, impulse regulation,
addiction, and rewards processing. They believe finding the biologically
imbedded basis for behaviors can help us understand the physical
basis for our social interactions and ideally help correct behavioral
disorders.
Holly
Korschun is director of science communications.
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