For a couple of weeks now I have
been meaning to write a post about behavioral science, or as we seem to want to call
it in MR, neuromarketing. I admit to
being a skeptic, driven in part by a belief that it is very complex stuff for
MR to get its arms around and by controversies
like that surrounding Martin Lindstrom’s iPhone love story, which confirm
that belief. Nonetheless, I attended the
first day of The
2013 Applied Educational Alliance Assembly, partly out of curiosity about behavioral
science but also because it was happening about 15 minutes from my house.
It was a day well spent with an
excellent series of presentations, mostly by academics steeped in theory and a
broad literature of peer-reviewed experimental research. There is a lot that can be done way of
measuring emotions in the lab, but even then lots of unanswered questions and
dots to be connected. Measuring emotions
outside of the controlled environment of the lab is a good deal more
challenging.
Most of the others attendees were
marketers interested in leveraging emotions rather than measuring them, so it
was not as MR-focused as I might have liked.
But I did get the chance to talk to some of the presenters, especially
about how to separate the science from the bullshit. One of them had this to say: “In academia we
have a peer review process that separates out the good research from the bad
research; in market research you have the marketplace.”
By coincidence, that same day the
news came out about Google
using their glasses to measure emotions via eye pupil dilation. Although this sounds cool, The
Scientific American reminds us that doing this outside of the lab is harder
than we might think.
But I digress. What got me to finally write a post was the
release of the new book, Neuromarketing
for Dummies. My first thought was
that it was a hoax, a parody. What fun! But no, it’s the real deal. Already being lavished with praise on Greenbook. And it probably will sell like crazy in MR
because this is how the industry learns new things: pop science, not real
science. Always looking for the Cliff
Notes. Boiling it down to a few bullets
on a PowerPoint slide.
Behavioral science is the real
deal. Just as big data has the potential
to redefine how we describe what people do, behavioral science can transform
how we describe why they do it. We
should be digging into it, learning its foundations, and not overselling
it. Unlikely on all three counts.
Comments
3 responses to “Neuromarketing for Dummies: a book that knows its target audience”
Greetings, and thanks for mentioning our new book, Neuromarketing for Dummies. Yes, the title is going to be a hurdle for some, but I’m glad you dug in enough to see it’s not a parody (at least it wasn’t meant to be!). I hope you will dig further and give it a read. It’s based exclusively on peer-reviewed academic research, not pop science. At 408 pages, it’s hardly a Cliff Notes.
I am currently putting together an addendum, to be available on our website (www.intuitiveconsumer.com) that will provide references for all the research we cited. It will be about 80 pp of citations, when I get it done (one limitation of the “Dummies” format is that they don’t like footnotes). It will be up on the website shortly.
I hope you will give it a read, with an open mind, and perhaps update your opinion. My background is also in survey research (PhD in Political Science) so I also see myself as something of a survey geek. But the new research on the nonconscious, which we discuss at length, and which is probably best summarized in Daniel Kahneman’s great book, Thinking Fast and Slow, can’t be denied. We can’t fully understand consumers just be asking them questions. We need new tools to get at those sources of consumer choice that consumers don’t have conscious access to, and for that, we need to learn and apply some new techniques.
What’s useful and what’s hokum? That’s what the book is all about. I hope you have a chance to read it. Thanks, Steve
Hi Steve — thanks for the comment.I tried to make the point in my last paragraph that I believe the underlying behavioral science (Kahneman’s book being perhaps the best exploration of it) is solid. I think where we trip ourselves up (or the charlatans make their money) is in the move from theory to practice. I meant the post to be about that leap and the casual way in which many in MR make it, and not just in behavioral science but the other sciences we rely on to do our work.
I have downloaded the book and will give it a read, although I’m traveling pretty much non-stop the next month so it will take a while. I just wish you had decided to publish it in some other series. In desperation I have bought two of these books over the years (for poorly documented software) and found them not very helpful.
This is an excellent piece. It does beg the question regarding the barriers to learning research fundamentals.