Pushing the Buy Button; Companies are starting to turn to powerful brain-scan technology in order to figure out how we choose which products to purchase.

Byline: Clint Witchalls

The woman lying in the huge, doughnut-shaped magnet having her brain scanned is perfectly healthy. Radiologists at the Neurosense clinic in south London aren't looking for lesions or lumps. Instead, they've set up a periscope that allows her to view a series of videotaped advertisements. She doesn't have to do anything but watch--and perhaps daydream about whether a particular brand of chocolate seems yummy, or what it would be like to drive that new family sedan. While she's thinking, the doctors are looking to see if certain brain circuits are active and, if so, how excited they get.

Her experience could foretell the future of marketing. Sellers have always expended a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out what potential buyers really think (as opposed to what they say when you ask them). Now, using powerful brain-scan technology, they can do so scientifically. Ford of Europe uses such "neuromarketing" techniques to better understand how consumers make emotional connections with their brands. DaimlerChrysler has funded several research projects at the University of Ulm in Germany, using brain-imaging technology to decode which purchasing choices go into buying a car. Firms like Oxford-based Neurosense have sprung up to make neuromarketing a bona fide business tool. "The 1990s were declared 'the Decade of the Brain'," says Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist and marketing strategist at BrightHouse, an Atlanta, Georgia-based neuromarketing company. "We learned more about neuroscience in those 10 years than in the entire history that preceded them. I think business neuroscience is just one more field of inquiry."

Since the 1950s, the best tool for identifying which ads and products people will like has been the focus group. The problem is, it's notoriously unreliable, largely because social dynamics get in the way of truthful answers. Some subjects want to please the focus-group leader. Others want to dominate the group. "Almost every focus group throws up someone more vocal and bossy, who either inspires others to follow or react against [them] or both," says Tim Ambler, senior fellow at London Business School. Perhaps that's why only one in 100 products survives in the marketplace after the typical product launch.

Imaging technology, on the other hand, holds out the promise of objectively measuring a person's reaction by seeing how his brain is responding. Given that 95 percent of human cognition takes place unconsciously, there's a lot more information to be had by going straight to the source and observing which regions of the brain are active. Forget what the focus-group participant is telling you--look at those lovely spikes on her left inferotemporal cortex.

The roots of neuromarketing go back to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's assertion a decade ago that humans use the emotional part of the brain when making decisions, not just the rational part. That's precisely what marketers wanted to hear. Since then, researchers have turned to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which maps blood flow to different areas of the brain, to explore what goes on in the act of buying. The idea is that when the "buy" regions of the brain go into action, they draw a bigger blood supply to support their work, which shows up--millisecond by millisecond--on an fMRI scan. (According to ...