It sounds like something out of “The Minority Report,” but apparently it’s really happening:
Corporations are reaching into people’s minds to mine their emotional reactions to their products and advertising campaigns and concepts.
This mind-blowing phenomenon is the subject of a fascinating — yet at the same time incredibly creepy magazine story— in the September issue of Fast Company by writer Adam L. Penenberg.
The story centers around a Berkeley, California-based company called NeuroFocus founded by A.K. Pradeep. It was apparently the only one of these kinds of companies willing to go on-the-record about its services.
NeuroFocus makes a product called “Mynd,” ‘the world’s first portable, wireless, electroencephalogram (EEG) scanner. The device (pictured at left) senses an individual’s brain waves and transmits them via BlueTooth to any remote device to store the information.
Penenberg writes that “Consumers will be paid to wear them while they watch TV, head to movie theaters, or shop at the mall. The firm will collect the resulting streams of data and use them to analyze the participants’ deep subconscious responses to the commercials, products, brands, and messages of its clients.”
Intel has used NeuroFocus’ services, reports Penenberg, as has Pepsico’s Frito-Lay, CBS, ESPN, and California Olive Ranch.
The process can help companies to figure out people’s perceptions of their brands, as well as their products.
Using Mynd, Frito-Lay discovered that people experience a powerful reaction of delight and subversion over the mess they create when they munch on Cheetos and get “orange cheese dust” all over themselves. They subsequently created an ad campaign that emphasized the mess.
“For its efforts, NeuroFocus earned a Grand Ogilvy award for advertising research, given out by the Advertising Research Foundation, for ‘demonstrating the most successful use of research in the creation of superior advertising that achieves critical business objective,'” Penenberg writes.
Reading this account, it’s hard not to think how the greatest marketers of them all — politicians — might use this tool.
Indeed, Penenberg says at the end of the article that NeuroFocus doesn’t intend to get involved in politics, but knows of firms who have worked with Republican candidates in the 2010 midterm elections.
Wonderful news — that’s just more of what we need — even more manipulations instead of straight talk from the politicos.
