Page 203 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

Market research 195
influx of this new money led to an inflation of prices. MMOGs are a virtual economy filled with self-aware participants acting in a normal manner, some are self-interested, others selfless. Companies that sell MMOGs may not have realized at the time, but they might have created the ideal testing ground for conducting market research.
AN EMERGING APPROACH – NEUROMARKETING
The field of marketing research marches onward year after year, new techniques, new approaches. When garbology first came about, many found much amusement in the idea of rooting through someone’s garbage in order to better understand their consumption patterns. Today, it is much more accepted – though still assigned to more junior market researchers. A type of marketing research which has recently garnered considerable attention is neuromarketing. What particularly set off this interest was a study published in the 14 October, 2004 issue of Neuron. Researchers monitored brain-scans of 67 people who were given a blind taste test of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Using brain-scanners they could see that each soft drink ‘lit up’ the brain’s reward system. Participants were evenly split about which drink they preferred. However, when the same people were told what they were drinking, activity in a different set of brain regions were engaged. Three out of four said they preferred Coca-Cola. This demonstrated in a fairly dramatic way that brand matters.
Marketers have long regarded the human mind as a black box. We marketers do our thing: beaming advertising, direct-marketing pieces, a sales pitch or what have you to our target market. We can measure the results of that marketing effort in terms of sales, awareness, liking, etc. We understand reasonably well the beginning and end of the process but not the vital part in the middle. That is, what goes on inside the mind of the consumer. This is what is changing with neuromarketing. First, the basic fundamental science underlying neuromarketing is neuroscience, which is the study of the how the brain gives rise to the mind. In other words, how the brain enables us to perceive, think, make decisions, feel emotions, communicate (i.e. the neural basis of human experience). Techniques used by neuroscience are: psychophysics (reaction