I love?

Every day, you're bombarded with brand names and ads for various products. Now, a recent study shows that your purchasing choices may be influenced more by marketing strategies than by the quality of the product.

In a taste test, P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist (brain scientist) at Baylor University in Texas, had volunteers drink from unlabeled cups of Coke and Pepsi. Next, they gulped from labeled cups.

When these soda sippers didn't know what they were drinking, their taste-testing tongues preferred Pepsi. And their brains did too: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, which measure brain activity, showed that Pepsi triggered more activity in a region of the brain that signals reward.

However, when the drinks were labeled, Coke won the cola war. This time, the brain region tied to "sense of self" showed the most activity.

What lesson can you glean from the study? "Coke's marketing strategy has, over the years, become part of our cultural identity," says John Van Horn, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College. And that seems to translate into more sales.

Neuromarketing, the study of the brain's emotional response to various products, may change how companies advertise their products, says Van Horn. Commercials targeting children seem to be most effective. "Making that [emotional] association early in life is probably the best means of getting people to buy a product later on," he says.

Did You Know?

* The brain is made up of more than 100 billion neurons, or nerve cells.

* Like neuromarketing, neuroeconomics is a new branch of science that aims to unravel how your brain interacts with the outside environment to make decisions such as product preferences. The field, which combines neuroscience, economics, and psychology, aims to help better predict the ups and downs of the economy.

Resources

* Learn more about how the different parts of the brain function at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/functional.html

* Be sure to check out the Science Museum's online exhibition on the brain at: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/brain/index.asp

COPYRIGHT 2005 Scholastic, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning