I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the influence of Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, on journalistic accounts and public perceptions of the new “neuromarketing” field.
In 2007 there were a number of reviews and appreciations of The Hidden Persuaders written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its publication. I just finished reading a [...]
There is an active “neuromarketing” group over on LinkedIn that is worth joining and following if you are interested in this field. Ron Wright, who started the group, asked in a recent discussion whether there should be standards in the industry, in part in response to a comment I made in an earlier post.
I thought [...]
I came across an interesting post in ScienceDaily – Consumer Behavior yesterday about how people draw inferences from seemingly neutral packaging features. The referenced article is by two Canadian researchers:
Hammond D, & Parkinson C (2009). The impact of cigarette package design on perceptions of risk. Journal of public health (Oxford, England) PMID: 19636066
The ScienceDaily post [...]
In a recent post haranguing against the term “neuromarketing”, I referenced Mya Frazier’s front-page piece in Advertising Age back in September 2007, “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?“. As noted in that post, the neuromarketers she portrayed went more than a little overboard in their efforts to extol the virtues and magic of their techniques, and [...]
A thread that runs through quite a number of the journalistic treatments I read about neuroscience applied to commercial stimuli (like ads, products, and brands) is fear … fear of a “Manchurian Candidate” technique that will turn people into consuming robots, fear of privacy, fear of science being co-opted by greedy corporations at the expense [...]
Professor Marc Blitz has posted a lengthy but very thought-provoking article over at Neuroethics & Law Blog about whether the First Amendment should protect “subliminal messaging”. He does not come to any hard and fast conclusions, but in good lawyerly fashion examines various arguments for and against the influence of deliberate and inadvertent subliminal stimuli, [...]
It’s all neuro-this and neuro-that, so I suppose coining a new term to talk about the ethics of commercial neuroscience shouldn’t come as a surprise. “Neuroethics” it is.
We’re finally starting to see some serious examination of ethical issues in “neuromarketing”. A recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour (July-Oct 2008) was devoted to neuromarketing, [...]