Berlin is known as a startup factory, with many young businesses cutting their teeth here. With neuromarketing perhaps one of the youngest fields on the block, it is not surprising that it is well represented in this city.
Apple Emotions
When most people hear the term “neuro”, a pretty image of a brain with colourful patches pops into mind. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), otherwise known as “brain scanning”, has become the poster child for all things neuro, representing neuroscience's sexy side in the public eye. That is marketing appeal just waiting to be tapped, and that is exactly what the startup INCORE has done.
Apple users elicit an emotional reaction to the brand unlike samsung users
They have capitalized on the appeal of fMRI by offering it as a neuromarketing service, proposing that market research on consumers inside the scanner will lead to a deeper understanding of how brands are perceived. With Dr. Simone Kühn of the Max Planck Institute at the scientific helm, they claim to “measure the unconscious emotional reactions of targ[et] groups” via fMRI [1]. They have done studies on brand perception of international giants such as Coca-Cola and Apple, with results suggesting that Apple users have an emotional reaction to the brand which is absent from Samsung users. Obviously, this is no cheap service, but perhaps the appeal of brain scanning will be strong enough to draw business in.
Measuring "Unconscious Emotions"?
FMRI might be prohibitively expensive for most companies, but there are cheaper alternatives out there. Berlin seems to have an abundance of attention-modeling startups, offering scientifically grounded analysis of media design, such as websites, to improve layout and maximize profits. Attention determines where we look and for how long, and companies are obviously keen to get this right when they are trying to communicate with a customer via a webpage or advertisement.
One way to measure attention is with eye tracking. By directly measuring where users look, you know what has grabbed their attention and what has not. The startup Emolyzr does just this, in combination with other measurements such as electromyography and skin conductance. Specifically, Emolyzr claims to measure the “unconscious emotions” of users, although what exactly they mean by this is not clear [2].
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Attention: With or Without Humans?
Although cheaper than fMRI, eye tracking is also not without its costs. Another startup, Attensee, replaces eye tracking with mouse exploration [3]. Users are presented with a blurred version of the website, and as they move their mouse cursor around the screen a small portion of content is revealed. This is cheaper and faster than eye tracking, while still returning real participant data.
However, in the dog-eat-dog world of marketing, it is all about money and speed, and the startup EyeQuant attempts to push both of these to the bottom line by removing the participant altogether [4]. Instead of relying on human subjects to indicate what is attention grabbing, they implement a fully computational saliency and attention model, reducing both time required for a result (allegedly within seconds) and potentially cost as well. Of course, the highly complex model behind EyeQuant is itself validated against human eye tracking data.
But even so, modeling human behavior is a tricky business, and perhaps the main criticism of the method is that it is not always accurate (a claim that Attensee makes explicitly) [3]. However, with such speed and potential cost efficiency, and with saliency godfathers Prof. Laurent Itti and Prof. Christof Koch on the team, it is not surprising that Google has been a client already.
Check Your Brain App
Although not strictly neuromarketing, I could not help including the nascent startup BrainModes here. BrainModes aims to make neurofeedback available to the general public via an app. On their website, they state:
“We are developing the BrainModes app to visualize the brain activity of the user measured with BCI (brain-computer interface) devices, even if they have no prior experience. The visualization of brain activity is based on state-of-the-art computational neuroscience and brain imaging: a novel technology to provide detailed visualizations of brain activity based on sparse information collected with brain computer interface technology.” [5]
The idea is incredibly cool, and although they do not go into details about just what types of BCIs they will be working with, the notion that anybody could get a glimpse into the workings of their own brain via an app is tantalizing. It is unclear from their website whether the app will be commercial or not, but the team also appears to have been involved in some pretty wacky art installations involving neurofeedback. You can see a video of one of their previous projects here.
[1] http://www.incore-berlin.com/
[2] http://emolyzr.de/
[3] https://www.attensee.com/
[4] http://www.eyequant.com/
[5] http://www.brainmodes.com/
by James Kerr, MSc Student, International Experimental and Clinical Linguistics
this article originally appeared December 2015 in "Money on My Mind"
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