Hello and welcome to this new introductory course in neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience. My name is Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy. I'm the director of the Center for Decision Neuroscience here at the Copenhagen Business School. In this course, we'll talk about different aspects of consumer neuroscience, which means how the brains of consumers drive their choices. We'll talk about attention and conscientiousness, learning and memory, emotions and feelings. And ultimately, how we make up our minds. In this course, we talk about neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience, and they can mean two different things. Neuromarketing can refer to the commercial application of neuroscience technologies and insights to drive business further. On the other side, consumer neuroscience can be seen as the academic use of neuroscience to better understand marketing effects on consumer behavior. When we talk about the different concepts we use in this course, let's focus first on neuroscience. The term neuroscience is actually too broad to use in this course as it covers everything from single-cell studies all the way up to studying humans, and in between, we're studying rats, monkeys, and so forth. So, neuroscience in itself is too broad a term. Other terms such as neurology is too focused on the clinical aspects of neuroscience. So neurology tends to focus on people with brain disorder, brain injury, and so forth, and therefore, neurology shouldn't be used in this course. Cognitive and affective neuroscience are terms we can use in this course, so let's use the, these terms. But we can also accept using neuroscience if we refer to neuroscience as the cognitive and affective sides of human bu, brain behavior. Neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience is a multidisciplinary effort between economics, psychology and neuroscience. As you can see in this chart, consumer neuroscience positions itself right at the middle in this triangle. The term neuromarketing has sky-rocketed in interest during the past ten years. As you can see in this chart, the number of Google hits and the number of companies under the heading of neuromarketing, but also the number of academic papers has been on a steady rise ever since the beginning of this millennium. Why are we using neuroscience to understand consumers? Well, it's pretty simple actually. Traditional methods are using surveys, interviews, focus groups, where people are overtly and consciously reporting on their experiences and thoughts. On the other side, the unconscious side of consumer behavior is largely unmeasured in traditional methods. Neuroscience has the potential to understand the unconscious drivers of choice. In one example, as you can see here in the screen, we studied how people were behaving inside the store. And we were using mobile eye-tracking to track where people were looking while they were in the store. One group was exposed to the particular ad prior to entering the store and another group did not see that particular ad. What we saw was that, first of all, the control group had a certain amount of purchase towards a particular paint brand, while those who were exposed to a brand for a particular paint had much higher levels of purchasing that particular paint. When we asked people whether they thought that they would have been exposed to an ad or whether the ad had a, an effect on their choice, everybody said no. What you can see in this figure is that visual attention, you know, the heat map as you can see in this figure shows that people were exposed to the ad were much more prone to look and explore the shelves relevant to one particular pat, paint brand. When we talk about neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience, you must realize that the tool box is going to be looking very differently. We will talk about eye-tracking, computational neuroscience, and brain imaging such as EEG and fMRI. We will also learn about different structures because the structures of the brain are crucial to understand what drives consumer behavior. Here in this chart, we will talk about things such as the anterior cingulate cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the nucleus accumbens for example. One model that we can use to understand how brands affect consumers' brains is this model, as you can here, which was published by Plassman, Ramsøy and Milosavljevc a couple of years ago. The first stage is representation and attention. And this represents how you have bodily states, external states and motivations that drives your initial approach towards a brand and a product. The next stage is the predicted value. Now this stage, you are expecting an outcome. You might be positive, you might be negative, but you are predicting an outcome. The next level again is what we call the experienced value and this is the stage in which you are exposed to a product or a brand, and you are experiencing it, positive, neutral, negative. You have direct conscious experiences with it. And based on your predictions and your experienced value, this is something that turns into a, a memory for that event. You have a remembered value. And the remembered value and the learning from this sequence or predicting an outcome, having an outcome and learning from it is what we call learning of brand associations. In a seminal paper by Simon McClure and his colleagues, there was a study about the brain responses to thinking that you are drinking Coca-Cola versus Pepsi-Cola. First, the researchers allowed people to drink cola while they were in the scanner, and they scanned people without knowing which brand they were tasting. The more people enjoyed the cola, the stronger activation they found in the orbital frontal cortex. And this is a part of the brain we see being engaged every time people enjoy something more. That could be art, the beauty in the face, music or taste. When the researchers then exposed the participants to brands and tell, told people that they were drinking Coca-Cola, they saw a dramatic change in the brain activation. They saw a stronger activation of the hippocampus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Both structures are memory structures. When they looked at the added activation when people thought they were drinking Pepsi-Cola, no such activation was found. What this study shows us is that brand memory is a really crucial component in how we perceive brands, but also how they imbue value and affect the way in which we perceive and enjoy a product. And that rounds up the first session of this introduction to neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience. Next time, we'll talk about attention and consciousness. I look forward to see you then.
