About this Blog
Rationale
Lucid Thoughts is a forum for tracking and commenting on one of the most exciting – and some would say controversial – scientific developments of the new century, the commercialization of neuroscience, psychophysiology, and behavioral economics.
It doesn’t happen very often … a scientific discipline reaches a certain level of maturity, supporting technology gets faster and cheaper and more accessible, new tools become conceivable and then available, and large markets open up for new products and services that didn’t even exist a decade ago.
The underlying science and commercial applications are evolving rapidly and often surprisingly, providing us all a ringside seat on a real scientific revolution. As with any young and emerging field, there is a lot of silliness going on right next to the really important and serious stuff. Let’s see if we can tell the difference!
Full Disclosure and Philosophy
Lucid Thoughts is written by people with a dog in this race. The main author, Steve Genco, is was, until November 2009, CEO of Lucid Systems, Inc., a company founded in 2006 to translate academic neuro- and behavioral science into products and services for consumer and marketing researchers. Steve now serves as Chief Innovation Officer at NeuroFocus, Inc.
The driving philosophy behind this blog is Scientific Transparency. As we have watched our fledgling field emerge over the last few years, we have seen too many providers trying to sell “proprietary solutions” and “secret algorithms” that purportedly give their customers a direct peek into the “secret” thoughts and preferences of their consumers. The reality is much less sensational but, paradoxically, much more exciting.
Scientific Transparency
We are going to focus on Scientific Transparency in three ways:
First, anyone claiming to bring neuroscience-based solutions to the commercial market is standing on the shoulders of giants – a vast literature of findings, insights, and experimental techniques. If they claim to have created something new and proprietary, it may be a breakthrough that thousands of scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals over several decades have somehow missed, but more likely, it is new because it is scientifically invalid.
We think the actual science is incredibly exciting and that people who buy this kind of research have a right and an obligation to understand it well enough to support the decisions they have to make everyday. This doesn’t mean that they have to become neuroscientists themselves, but they need to understand the basic principles as well as the strengths and limitations of the methods in use.
So this blog is dedicated to appreciating and communicating the real science behind this field often called neuromarketing.
Second, this is not a basic science field, it is an applied science field. The interesting question is how to translate academic techniques and findings into practical tools for product development and marketing. Much of the academic literature uses the most simple and elegant stimuli to test specific theories and findings. We, on the other hand, want to learn about how people react to complex and rich stimuli like packages on a shelf, 30-second ads, TV programs, movie trailers, and information-packed web pages.
So the innovation required by our field is not secret and proprietary techniques for prying “the truth” out of human brains, but practical and replicable methods, approaches, and metrics for providing actionable information that can be applied to real-world marketing and product development decisions – Do I go with package A or package B? Do I reach my target market better with ad treatment A or ad treatment B?
We are going to talk honestly and openly about this translation process, where it is strong and reliable and where it is still weak and speculative, so our readers can make their own decisions about what they can use and what is not yet “ready for prime time”.
Third, we are going to devote some time to existing market research techniques and methodologies. The commercial interest in neuro-based research is not, as it is often characterized in the press, because this is an infallible secret weapon for finally controlling the thought-processes of unknowing consumers. Rather, much of the interest we have seen in the marketplace comes from a real dissatisfaction with current “self-reporting” techniques of consumer research.
Companies still want to ask the simplest questions about their products. Will people like it? Will they remember it? Will they buy it? If these companies were happy with current techniques for answering these questions, there would be no need or demand for newer approaches. But they are not happy. We know that 80 percent of new products fail. We know that the favorite aphorism of marketing professionals is
I know that 50 percent of my marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.
Current research techniques are not doing the job. For various reasons, what people say they like may not be what they really like. Neuroscience and behavioral economics are beginning to reveal why this is, and why traditional self-reporting techniques sometimes go wrong. From the point of view of buyers of research services, they just want to be wrong less often, not right all the time. To the extent that these new techniques improve decisions and make spending more rational, companies are anxious to make the investment.
Sometimes modest goals are the best.