It’s not just because it’s gotten a lot of bad press and now tends to trigger negative stereotypes about the field.

But it is  more than a little ironic that a field devoted to understanding how incidental stimuli can preconsciously impact our attitudes should find itself saddled with a “brand name” that is becoming synonymous with hidden manipulation for unsavory purposes.

One reason this has occurred is because journalists have consistently taken this route in characterizing the field.  Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders in 1957.  The premise of his book, that advertisers were manipulating people outside their conscious control with subliminal messaging, was based in part on the reported experiments of James Vicary, who claimed to have increased Coke and popcorn sales in a movie theater by flashing subliminal messages on the screen.  Despite the fact that Vicary acknowledged in 1962 that his experiment was a hoax invented to promote his business, the theme of “the hidden persuaders” remains a well-worn cliche in journalistic treatments of advertising.

An excellent example is Mya Frazier’s piece in Advertising Age in September 2007, “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?“.  The article allows a couple of neuromarketing practitioners speak for themselves, and then juxtaposes their claims with the opinions of academic researchers.  Ms. Frazier finds that the the academics are not impressed.  And indeed, whether through skillful editing or just accurate quoting, the neuromarketers present themselves in the article as more the heirs to Vicary than serious adapters of the neuroscience disciplines.

So the first problem with the term “neuromarketing” is that it has come to refer to the marketers, not the neuroscience.  Neuromarketers are seen as self-promoting hucksters-at-heart who use the labels of science, just as Vicary did, to justify the selling of advice to advertising and marketing clients at high prices.  No wonder journalists are incredulous.

But I find the term irritating for a more mundane reason … it implies that “neuro” is a kind of marketing, when in fact marketing is just marketing.  “Neuro” refers to research techniques that can be used to evaluate marketing.  Ultimately, marketers decide what messages they want to present to the public, neuromarketers only provide data that may or may not be useful to those marketers making the real decisions – which ad to run, which package to display on the shelf, how to position their brand in the competitive space, etc.

If one takes the term “neuromarketing” as a distinct species of marketing, then one starts getting back into “hidden persuaders” territory.  It must mean something like “marketing directly into the brain” in some way that is different than “ordinary” marketing.  And that does sound scary, doesn’t it?  But this is exactly why it’s such a bad term … there is no different kind of marketing directly into the brain, there is only marketing as it has always existed.  And that marketing, let’s be honest, has been using both direct and indirect persuasion to influencing attitudes, preferences, and decisions since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so.

In addition, neuromarketing is too limiting a term to describe how the tools of neuroscience and its related disciplines can be used.  At Lucid, we have done our share of research on marketing messages, but most of our work has been in the area of new product development.  Our clients are often not doing marketing at all, they are trying to determine if a new product will be accepted by consumers.  Neuro-based research techniques can be applied to much more than just marketing messages.  They can be used to understand people’s responses to products, brands, designs, packages, value propositions, sensory attributes like smell and taste, etc., etc.

I like to return to the analogy of Gaileo’s telescope.  Galileo applied the existing science of optics to create a practical instrument.  That instrument had many uses.  But if Galileo had followed the naming strategy behind “neuromarketing”, he would have called his instrument the “Moon Viewer”.  And he would have spent a lot of time explaining to people how this Moon Viewer could be used to study the rings of Saturn.

The term I prefer is “neurometrics”.  This is a generic term that is in common use, can’t be copyrighted (others have tried), and uses the prefix “neuro” to modify the right object.  It’s not the marketing that is “neuro”, it’s the metrics used to measure the marketing.  I also like the term neurometrics because it has a useful family resemblance to other types of metrics like sociometrics and psychometrics.  It is the application of metrics derived from a particular scientific discipline to a particular class of objects.

So every neurometrics firm should be judged by the metrics it has developed and the ability of those metrics to provide useful information about objects of interest.  To the extent that firms are unwilling to say what their metrics actually are, they are indeed “neuromarketing” firms, not neurometrics firms.  Caveat emptor.





A comment he received:

Hi Zack, thanks for providing the first comment on the new blog! We will virtually frame it and hang it on our virtual wall.

I agree “neurometrics” is not perfect. You probably see a lot of new terminology in your coverage of the neurotechnology community. If you see something that fits better, please pass it along.

We got to “neurometrics” via this line of thought … say we develop a way of measuring a person’s relative allocation of attention to stimuli. Say this measure is based on a P300 component generated in an ERP experiment. It’s therefore a “neuro” measure. Now suppose we translate that measure into a number on a 0-to-10 scale, where closer to 10 means more attention. That’s the “neurometric” — it’s a neuroscience-derived metric for measuring attention.

It can be used to measure attention to marketing stimuli, like ads, but it can also be used to measure attention to, say, products on a shelf, or benefit statements, or even training materials. That’s why we wanted a term that was more general than “neuromarketing”.

I think companies like ours sell the metrics, not the marketing.

We’ll keep thinking.