Subliminal advertising 2.0

In its June issue, Fast Company featured a write-up of a book by a former ad exec who has written an academic-sounding tome (with a textbook price of $45!) entitled “The Advertised Mind.” Apparently, the premise is that emotion is at the basis of all decision making and thus the key to marketing success lies in understanding how to trigger positive emotional reactions. Sounds innocuous enough (and pure common sense), on the surface anyway.

Then in the August edition of Business 2.0 we find an article on the emerging science of neuromarketing. Neuroco, a privately held firm in Great Britain, is at the forefront of this new discipline, melding neuroscience and clinical psychology with the heretofore fluffier discipline of advertising. The result? Sensory and psychic manipulation (my term) that’s thoroughly tested using electroencephalography technology (brain scans) before an ad goes prime-time.

The first sign that this obviously growing market research trend borders on troubling, if not alarming? None of the company’s clients (among them six multinational companies) were willing to talk about the research they’ve commissioned.

I do believe in delivering results—results that can be measured. And the neuro-marketing approach goes a long way toward taking the guesswork and capriciousness out of campaigns that companies spend countless dollars on with no guarantee of a return. In addition, it corrects what is a fundamental flaw with the focus group concept: what people say doesn’t always jibe with what they’re truly feeling or experiencing in the recesses of their minds.

But I viscerally object to such an approach, in part because it takes a lot of the fun out of marketing and, at the risk of sounding trite, it smacks of Orwell. In addition, I do think on some level it’s manipulation, perhaps even more insidious than so-called subliminal advertising. Call me a Luddite.

Perhaps I’m ascribing too much power to neuromarketing. After all, stimulating emotional responses and steering them toward a desired behavior is a tricky proposition; conceivably, such efforts could just as easily backfire.

Final soapbox thought: I shutter to think of the lawsuits coming down the pike that will blame criminal and other antisocial behavior on Proctor & Gamble or some other advertiser once neuromarketing really takes root. And you know what—given the lengths some companies might go to trigger just the right synaptic response, I just might be sympathetic to such claims.