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The science of shopping
Broadcast: December 2, 2002 | Reporter: Margo Kelly; Producer: George Prodanou; Researcher: Jennifer Haynes

"Unprecedented insight into the consumer mind," Adam Koval, Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences

Corporations are going to new lengths to probe the minds of consumers.

A company in Atlanta is scanning people's brains with MRIs, in an effort to record our subconscious thoughts about products and ads.

The process has been dubbed neuromarketing. It's being hailed as a giant leap in the science of selling, but the technique is also raising some concerns.

For corporations that want to sell us stuff, the shopper's mind is a territory to be mapped. In a hospital in Atlanta, researchers are trying to do that mapping. They're paying people to lie inside MRI machines and look at pictures of products while the machine snaps images of their brains.

The Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences claims it's closing the gap between business and science — with the goal of getting us to behave the way corporations want us to.

"What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind. And it will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave," company executive Adam Koval told Marketplace.

Back in Toronto, we caught up with Cathy Denison as she was trying on a fur coat.

"I look like a movie star. You've got to have an attitude when you wear a coat like that…That's the kind of thing, I don't need it, but I want it."

And that's exactly what neuro-marketers want to do— strengthen our emotional bonds with products.

Early stages

Advertising veteran Allan Middleton teaches marketing at York University. He says neuromarketing is in its early stages — and he's mostly skeptical about what it can do.

"If it works…you get to 1984 and Brave New World." Marketing professor Allan Middleton

"Theoretically, if you could possibly not only understand how people respond in a laboratory situation to a buying stimulus, then it will certainly help marketers forecast behavior. Well, if it works — which by the way I don't think it will — I mean, you get to 1984, and more importantly, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World."

Middleton doesn't think there's one magic technique —or image— that will compel us to buy something, because there are so many products and messages competing for our attention.

Still, neuromarketing is attracting some corporations with a lot money to spend - though Brighthouse's Adam Koval won't say which companies are interested:

"We can't actually talk about the specific names of the companies, but they are global consumer product companies. Right now, they would rather not be exposed. We have been kind of running under the radar with a lot of the breakthrough technology."

NEXT: 'Troubling science' worries some »

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