Marketing has discovered neuroscience and the shiny new product has plenty of style but very little substance. “Neuromarketing” is lighting up the eyes of advertising executives and lightening the wallets of public relations companies. It promises to target the unconscious desires of consumers, which are supposedly revealed by measuring the brain. The more successful agencies have some of the world’s biggest brands on their books and these mega-corporations are happy to trumpet their use of brain science in targeting their key markets. The holy grail of neuromarketing is to predict which ads will lead to most sales before they’ve been released but the reality is a mixture of bad science, bullshit and hope.

First, it’s important to realise that the concept of neuroscience is used in different ways in marketing. Sometimes, it’s just an empty ploy aimed at consumers – the equivalent of putting a bikini-clad body next to your product for people who believe they’re above the bikini ploy. A recent Porsche advert apparently showed a neuroscience experiment suggesting that the brain reacts in a similar way to driving their car and flying a fighter jet, but it was all glitter and no gold. The images were computer-generated, the measurements impossible, and the scientist an actor.

In complete contrast, neuromarketing is also a serious research area. This is a scientifically sound, genuinely interesting field in cognitive science, where the response to products and consumer decision-making is understood on the level of body and mind. This might involve looking at how familiar brand logos engage the memory systems in the brain, or examining whether the direction of eye gaze of people in ads affects how attention-grabbing they are, or testing whether the brain’s electrical activity varies when watching subtly different ads. Like most of cognitive neuroscience, the studies are abstract, ultra-focused and a long way from everyday experience.

The recent Porsche advert.

Finally, there is the murky but profitably grey area of applied neuromarketing, which is done by commercial companies for big-name clients. Here, the pop-culture hype that allows brain-based nonsense in consumer adverts meets the abstract and difficult-to-apply results from neuromarketing science. The result is an intoxicating but largely ineffective mix that makes sharp but non-specialist executives pay millions in the hope of maximising their return on branding and advertising.

Actually, it’s not always the case that executives are being sold a dud, sometimes they’re just being resold an established technique. For example, many neuromarketing companies use eye-tracking technology. Useful if you want to check whether your expensive ad will attract attention in the right places, but not “neuro”. Skin conductance can be used to check how physiologically arousing an ad might be. Again, interesting, but not a measure of the brain.

When you get to the actual neuroscience in applied neuromarketing, it is usually so poorly applied that it is either largely for show or is clearly not sufficiently understood by the people who are selling it. Most companies use EEG, a measure of the electrical activity of the brain through electrodes placed on the scalp. One problem is that these signals can be drowned out by electrical activity in the muscles and are sensitive to interference from other electrical devices. Genuine EEG research overcomes these problems by using extremely sensitive equipment in electrically shielded environments and by repeatedly doing the same tests, to average out any interference. Much of commercial neuromarketing EEG uses cheap kit, in poorly controlled, poorly designed experiments, that often produces junk data.

The idea that the brain can reveal hidden truths about consumers is misleading

The most exclusive neuromarketing companies use fMRI brain scans that claim to read the activity of certain brain areas. But if you talk to neuroimaging researchers they will tell you that there are many sources of possible interference, the results are sensitive to slight changes in analysis, and drawing strong conclusions from a single study is a minefield.

The bottom line is this. For neuromarketing to be useful, it should predict marketing success better than measures of opinion and behaviour. So far, only two studies have come close. One claimed to show that brain scans suggested which ads were linked to the best market performance, but the association was weak and the analysis prone to false positives. The other, and probably the only genuinely hopeful study in applied neuromarketing, reported that the response of the brain’s reward system to newly released songs predicted later success.

The idea that the brain can reveal hidden and profitable truths about consumers is attractive but misleading, not least because behaviour is the bottom line in business. The most powerful development in marketing is not neuroscience but invisible and ever-present experiments. Every time you go online, marketers can test which ads and prices make you most likely to part with your cash. Because we tend to shop on the internet alone, few realise that others are tested with a different set of images and offers, before the most effective ones are chosen for the biggest return. The benefits are obvious, the tests are easy to run, and the scale is massive.