Do you know how YOU FEEL? Don’t worry, I WILL TELL YOU how you feel!

Don’t be surprised if you hear a marketer or advertiser trying to explain to you how YOU feel in the near future! They now have a new tool available that can actually tell you what your feelings are even better than you can sometimes articulate. The new field of study is called Neuromarketing. According to neuromarketingresearch.com, Neuromarketing is a combination of neuroscience, psychology and other cognitive science techniques that are used to study consumer responses to marketing stimuli. The technique uses brain scans, iris scans and heart rate tests among other things to see how people feel when presented with different products. To me it is interesting to think of an outside person telling me how I feel about something. For example, there have been occasions in which I try a new food and when asked if I liked it, I’m not sure if I did or not. Sometimes I just say “it’s different”. What does different mean? Is it good or bad? I can’t determine it myself but apparently, marketers can’t. Under a neuromarketing study, if I try the food and my heart rate goes up, that means I like it. I wonder how they are going to control for other elements such as the things that are going through my mind at that same moment, maybe my heart rate went up because I was thinking of the skydiving jump I did yesterday and not because of the food I just tried. Regardless of this potential drawback, neuromarketing is fascinating to me in the sense that we will now be able to understand consumers at a deeper level. Take the Campbell Soups’ example. It is obvious the company truly believes in this new method, as they recently changed their packaging and labeling based on neuromarketing result studies. A WSJ article explains that Campbell did a 2 year study in which they researched microscopic changes in skin moisture and heart rate among other things when consumers saw pictures of bowls of soup and different logos. These results led Campbell to change the size of their logo among other things.

One potential and very valid fear of most people regarding this technique is that marketers will now “be inside our brains”. If the information were to be misused it could be terrible, but for now it doesn’t seem as dangerous to people considering first and foremost that they can’t measure you if you don’t agree to it. The field is too new to judge and in any case it would be better for Washington to set the rules of the game in advance so they don’t need in the future to respond to a very preventable issue that definitely plays with the privacy of individuals.