The ethics of NeuroMarketing

I’ll admit, the notion of a science that can peer into the human mind gives a lot of people the willies. When most of us hear ‘brain scan’, our imaginations slither into paranoia. It feels like the ultimate intrusion, a giant and sinister Peeping Tom, a pair of x-ray glasses peering into our innermost thoughts and feelings.

Project Buyology applied the stiffest research regulations and standards and mapped rules that other global studies might adopt in the future. We established an ethics panel, based in Oxford, England, which included administrative officials from participating hospitals and fMRI experts. The panel monitored test plans and examined results. Throughout the three-year-long study, the panel recommended adjustments to stimuli, for example, to ensure they weren’t deleterious in any way to our volunteers. The panel also vetoed certain research angles that we proposed. The business community needs to be aware of what can and can’t be done in the brain scanning research environment. I hope that Buyology will be a key to communicating this awareness.

Buyology and the ethical agenda

An organization known as Commercial Alert, which has petitioned Congress to put an end to NeuroMarketing, claims that brain-scanning exists to “subjugate the mind and use it for commercial gain.” What happens, the organization asked once in a letter to Emory University President James Wagner (Emory’s neuroscience wing has been termed “the epicenter of the neuromarketing world”), if a neuroscientist who’s an expert in addiction uses his knowledge to “induce product cravings through the use of product-related schemes”? Could it even, the organization asks in a petition sent to the U.S. Senate, be used as political propaganda “potentially leading to new totalitarian regimes, civil strife, wars, genocide and countless deaths?”.

How Neuromarketing helps us fight the tobacco industry

While I have enormous respect for Commercial Alert and its opinions, I strongly believe they are unjustified. Of course, as with any newborn technology, NeuroMarketing brings with it the potential for abuse, and with this comes an ethical responsibility. I take this responsibility extremely seriously, because at the end of the day, I’m a consumer, too, and the last thing I’d want to do is help companies manipulate us or control our minds.

But I don’t believe NeuroMarketing is the insidious instrument of corrupt governments or crooked advertisers. I believe it is simply a tool, like a hammer. Yes — in the wrong hands a hammer can be used to bludgeon someone over the head, but that is not its purpose, and it doesn’t mean that hammers should be banned, or seized, or embargoed. The same is true for NeuroMarketing. It is simply an instrument used to help us decode what we as consumers are already thinking about when we’re confronted with a product or a brand — and sometimes even to help us uncover the underhanded methods marketers use to seduce and betray us without our even knowing it. It isn’t my intention to help companies use brain-scanning to control consumers’ minds, or to turn us into robots. Sometime, in the distant future, there may be people who use this tool in the wrong way. But my hope is the huge majority wield this same instrument for good: to better understand ourselves — our wants, our drives, and our motivations — and use that knowledge for benevolent, and practical purposes. (And if you ask me, they’d be fools not to.)

My belief? That by better understanding our own irrational behavior — whether it’s why we buy a designer shirt, or a TV show — we actually gain more control, not less. Because the more we know about why we fall prey to the tricks and tactics of advertisers, the better we can defend ourselves against them. And the more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to the market. I receive hundreds of spam emails every day. Imagine those were to disappear and the thousands of wasted messages you and I receive every day were replaced with just a couple of relevant and really useful messages.

After all, don’t marketers want to provide products that we fall in love with? Stuff that engages us emotionally, and that enhances our lives? Seen in this light, brain-scanning, used ethically, will end up benefiting us all. Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy consumers at the same time. That’d be a nice combo.