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Cover/Top Stories In Search of the Buy Button What makes some products irresistible? Neuroscientists are racing to find the answer to that question--and to pass it along to consumer marketers.It could be a scene from a new age salon. Eight young women squirm under electrode-studded caps in a dark, small room in Greenwich, England. "Relax," intones Nicholas Coomans, a market researcher. "Imagine you are sitting on your own sofa for 20 minutes of TV." Coomans turns off the light and slips into an adjacent room so he can watch as the subjects take in a taped sitcom and six commercials. Coomans and his colleague, cognitive neuroscientist João Neves, aren't watching for facial expressions, body language or verbal feedback. They're interested only in their subjects' brains, which are abuzz with electrical activity, recorded as rows of squiggly lines crawling across the screen of a Dell laptop. The electroencephalograph picks up cognitive functions in 12 different regions of the brain, showing memory recall and the level of attention paid to visual and aural stimuli.Are the subjects really focusing on pitches for Kit Kat candy, Smirnoff vodka and the Volkswagen Passat? Are they forming emotional attachments to these products? Unlike the people answering questionnaires or participating in focus groups, brain waves don't lie. An activity spike in the left prefrontal cortex--an "approach" response to the image of a Kit Kat chocolate bar--would suggest the subject is attracted to the brand image or message. When the right prefrontal cortex gets jumpy, it indicates, in this experiment, instinctive revulsion to an obnoxious, tongue-wagging character who pops up in a commercial for Carling beer. When researchers zero in on electrical activity in yet another area, they can tell which parts of commercial messages, if any, are encoded in the experimental subjects' long-term memories. "People who are more likely to purchase a product show significantly higher memory encoding than those who are less likely," explains Richard Silberstein, a neuroscientist with the Brain Sciences Institute at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. He developed the headgear used in Greenwich. Using machines that detect brain tumors and strokes to determine whether pink satin underthings will outsell black ones or if people really like pickles on their hamburgers--could this yield practical results? Some big marketers are sufficiently intrigued to put research money into the idea. Among the companies looking into whether brain signals can supplement or replace traditional tests of consumer response to commercials are General Motors, Ford of Europe, and Camelot, the U.K.'s national lottery operator. Advertising, for the moment, remains more art than science. Brand marketers have tried appealing to people's emotions as well as to their sense of reason. They've tried guilt, anxiety, envy, fear, humor and suspense. There's no guarantee that they'll hit the mark by decoding synaptic firings and measuring fluctuations in blood flow. But they can try. Neuroscientists say that by peering inside your head they can tell whether you identify more strongly with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, say, than with J.R.R. Tolkien's Frodo. A beverage company can choose one new juice or soda over another based on which flavor trips the brain's reward circuitry. It's conceivable that movies and TV programs will be vetted before their release by brain-imaging companies. A "fascinating" possibility, says William Raduchel, until recently the chief technology officer at AOL Time Warner, who explored using MRI technology for that purpose last fall. "It's a little like mind reading," says Henrik Walter, a neurologist and psychiatrist with the University Clinic of Ulm, Germany, where he conducts brain-imaging work for DaimlerChrysler. All this is moving toward an elusive goal: to find a "buy button" inside the skull and to test products, packaging and advertising for their ability to activate it. So far, researchers are figuring out which brain states facilitate product recognition and choice; they're related to primal urges like those for power, sex and sustenance. As for brand loyalty, it turns out that memory and emotion play a big role. "In the not-too-distant future, firms will be able to tell precisely if an advertising campaign or product redesign triggers the brain activity and neurochemical release associated with memory and action," predicts James Bailey, professor of organizational behavior at George Washington University. Folks have been trying for decades to decode what motivates shoppers. Economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen took a crack at it in The Theory of the Leisure Class, the 1899 classic that wryly posited the theory of "conspicuous consumption," his phrase for keeping up with the Joneses. In the 1930s George Gallup began polling people and peddling his findings to companies desperate for information about buyers. Twenty years later big ad agencies were tapping psychologists such as Ernest Dichter, founder of the Institute for Motivational Research. Some of Dichter's preachings--among them: that marketers should offer absolution to consumers who indulge in guilty pleasures like smoking cigarettes or eating sweets--seem laughably simple today. If the fanciful quest hasn't changed, the tools of the trade have. There's eye tracking to monitor what people look at on a page or screen and for how long. Measuring galvanic skin response--changes in the electrical resistance, that is--can gauge emotional involvement. "So much of what drives our behavior happens without our awareness, how can business learn what people don't know they know? This is where these tools fit in," says Gerald Zaltman, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School and author of How Customers Think. No tool gets more use than the Zamboni-size functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, which takes neural eavesdropping to a new level. The $2.5 million device uses a large magnet to induce radio signals from chemicals in the brain and thereby monitor blood flow. It differs from the MRI of medical tests in making moving images rather than still ones. Thinking during tasks shows up in color in cross-sectional images, recorded as the subject lies with his head inside the scanner.
Microsoft Heads Off 'Blaster' Attack - 8/15/03 5:23:48 PM ET The company has added network capacity and cut the link to a Web site that has been targeted for attack. IRS Gives A Break To Tax Filers Hit By Blackout - 8/15/03 12:06:47 PM ET The IRS said it would allow tax filers an extra week to file or make payments. Berlin Opposes Foreign Buy Of Daimler Unit - 8/15/03 10:56:47 AM ET The German government doesn't want DaimlerChrysler to sell MTU aero engine unit to a foreigner. Vivendi Entertainment Bidding Deadline Looms - 8/15/03 9:15:54 AM ET Final bids for Vivendi's U.S. entertainment empire are likely to fall short of the $14 billion mark. Hub Terminates Near North Deal - 8/15/03 11:10:49 AM ET It ends talks to acquire insurance brokerage operating assets of Near North National. 
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