Why Neuromarketing Is A Neuroscam
EEG Petter Kallioinen via Wikimedia Commons Poor data and poorer analysis do not make true scientific results. As a rule, almost anything that involves the prefix neuro is probably a buzzword. Brains! They're the key to everything! Pretty pictures of brain scans or electrical pulses can reveal the depths of the human experience! We're even more likely to believe poor explanations of psychology when they're accompanied by gratuitous neuroscience jargon. Perhaps no field is buzzier than neuromarketing, a concept invented in the 1990s by Harvard psychologists and now used by companies like Google, Frito-Lay and CBS. Neuromarketers operate on the principle that simple focus groups and surveys aren't enough to truly figure out what people want--marketing needs to tap into the subconscious parts of the brain. Marketers need to know what you want before you want it. And so neuromarketers co-opt the techniques of neuroscience--analyzing the brain's responses to products with...