What Makes a Product Cool

There are certain people who are much more sensitive to negative information, who tend to be ruminators or worriers. They're maybe more motivated by avoiding things than by receiving things. There's a very different psychology going on with those people. A lot of marketing treats the consumer in monolithic terms. These results suggest that there are many different kinds of consumers who are sensitive to different information.

You also saw some interesting effects when you asked people to make decisions about buying luxury products like Louis Vuitton and Gucci at full price and at a discount.

We see this "cost" play out in the brain with luxury products in that there is both a reward activation in the nucleus accumbens and a strong response in the anterior cingulate, which is involved in conflict between two different kinds of signals. People have strong desire but also, because of the prices, it generates conflict. The conflict signal decreases when people are given a chance to purchase the product at a discount, which increases their overall reward evaluation of the product.

Has industry accepted the idea of neuromarketing?

There's been an intensification of interest, but it's still at that transitional stage. My guess is we're probably where biotechnology was 20 or 25 years ago when genetics was just beginning to go from the lab to an applied setting.

Isn't there something a little creepy about this -- marketers figuring out how my brain works before I do and manipulating my emotions?

With any new technology, there's a responsibility to understand all the elements and facets of its potential use. One of the things that surprised me was that I had this perception that marketing was this all powerful force that could manipulate people. As an outsider, I was struck that it's not clear that marketing does anything at all. Maybe the goal is just to try to improve the efficiency of this whole process, versus what seems like a lot of money that gets wasted. It just seems like we're so far from any Orwellian scenario that this technology really doesn't add a whole lot to those concerns.

Is there potential for abuse -- such as manipulating children?

If anything, I think the brain science will motivate thinking about public policy. We know that the processes that underlie decision making aren't mature in children, and we know that response inhibitions aren't well-developed in children. In the larger context, this will help us clarify what we ought to be doing in marketing and ought not to be doing in marketing. The brain science might ultimately tell us that it may be inappropriate to market goods to people below a certain age.

You were scanned, too, looking at cool products. What did you learn about yourself?

It was this high response in the cool project to a whole slew of products. As a scientist, I like to think of my decisions as being more rational and considered. But this suggests to me that I'm just as open to these high emotional social evaluations as anyone else.