Marketers Exploiting Secrets of the Living Brain with Tools of Neuroscience Kelly Crowe - CBC News
go to original January 3, 2013

Neuromarketer Diana Lucaci adjusts eye tracking goggles on shopper Denam Drew. Lucaci uses new technologies to measure consumers' engagement, attention and memory. (CBC)

The same primitive impulses that helped early man survive against the evolutionary odds are drawing shopper Denam Drew to a pair of tan suede shoes. At least that's the theory behind neuromarketing, an emerging field that uses the tools of neuroscience to understand the secrets of the consumer brain.

Drew is holding the shoe in his hand while researcher Adam Spadaro stands behind him watching his brain waves light up a computer screen in colourful flares of red, yellow and green. All of this is possible because Drew is wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap with electrodes placed all over his head, recording the electrical impulses on the surface of his brain. He's also wearing eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at when the computer records a flash of emotion.

"The goggles use the pupils as a reference point to track where your eyes are looking and wherever the eyes go, that's a measure of the attention of the brain and that's key information for marketers," Spadaro says. He's completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, but at the same time he's using his scientific knowledge to help get one of Canada's first neuromarketing companies off the ground.

"It would be really useful for a brand to know if this product is or is not capturing a consumer's attention," Spadaro says, struggling to balance his laptop computer in the middle of the shoe store and, at the same time, monitor the flashing images of Drew's brain on the screen.

"It's really giving you a lot of insight into his emotional response, much more so than if you were just to ask him how he’s feeling. Sometimes you can get a truer response to his emotion. That offers a lot of insight that neuroscience has been taking advantage of for several decades now and marketers are now beginning to take advantage of it."

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