Preference Predictability: Psychology or Physiology?

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase neuro-marketing? I personally think of that scene from Minority Report where advertising screens choose what to display based on retinal scans of passing citizens:



I find this futuristic scenario to be a strange but realistic representation of the near future. All it requires is:

(1) A retinal database of the population
(2) Dynamic and long-distance retinal scanner devices
(3) A database of consumer preferences linked to each specific citizen

                  How will these three components be integrated into our society? A retinal database will become necessary once crime scene investigators gain handheld retinal scan devices (due to the inevitable reduction of the price of the technology). This technique may provide alternative clues to an identity when fingerprint or dental records are insufficient. This program will most likely be worked into the early education system, ensuring that a large proportion of future citizens will already be stored in the database. As the technology improves and retinal scanners find more and more applications, they will most likely gain the ability to track faces and read eyes from a distance. There is current debate over the health impacts of biometric retinal scanners as they invasively fire infrared light directly into the eye. I believe that by the time the technology becomes more commercial these negative impacts will be reduced by using a different wavelength of light to scan. Of these three requirements, however, it is the consumer preference database that will be completed first, and it will be completed soon.

                  An online tracking company, known as RapLeaf, has been compiling large databases of consumer preferences, linking together a person’s name, e-mail, phone number, address, political affiliation, religious affiliation, hobbies, political/environmental causes and a host of other details. With a ’web spider’ that crawls the web collects information by browsing public face book profiles and searching for key words and phrases to determine a host of personal details, online tracking companies are quickly building up volumes of information on individual consumers and often distribute this data to other organizations to help them analyze consumer preferences. How much privacy does this violate? RapLeaf states that individuals can remove themselves from Rap Leaf’s ’services’ on their website, but what right did the organization have to automatically ‘serve’ us?

                   Let’s discuss what neuro-marketing means today. Neuro-marketing refers to the practice of measuring a diverse array of physiological variables (heart rate, skin conductivity, brain activity and pupil dilation) while consumers view various advertisements. Researchers then compare patterns in their reactions to motifs of behavior established in previous studies. Recently, Campbell’s soup employed neuro-marketing in its redesign of its soup cans and made the following changes:

                   While marketing through physiological and retinal analyses are vastly different, they inadvertently go hand in hand. Attempts to quantify how ’ideal advertising’ differs according to age, gender and culture are necessary precursors to dynamic advertising arrangements, where advertising targets not only geographic areas but individual people. As target markets for advertising narrow in scope as smaller and smaller groups are targeted simultaneously, don’t be surprised when you get an eerie feeling that you are losing some control over the brevity of choices available to you.
　
Breathe Deep, Seek Peace,
Jared Leichner

Sources:

RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560243259416072.html>
　
The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069562743700340.html>