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Article Excerpt
This article examines the impact of discoveries and methods of neuroscience on marketing practices as they relate to the exercise of individual free will. Thus, our focus centers on ethical questions involving consumers' awareness, consent, and understanding to what may be viewed as invasion of their privacy rights. After a brief introduction, the article turns to scientific literature on the brain, followed by discussion of marketing persuasion models. Ethical dilemmas within the free will paradigm and Rawlsian justice developed in moral philosophy are delineated next. The article closes with policy implications and a revised consideration of consumer privacy.
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Marketers seek to influence the intricate processes of evaluation and selection by consumers, sometimes reverting to tactics and technologies that redirect decision makers without their explicit permission. Examples include product placements in videogames, movies, and television programs (see LeGresley, Muggli, and Hurt 2006). Others make use of interpersonal influences in the marketplace (McGrath and Otnes 1995; Pechmann et al. 2005). For example, marketing professionals may pay females to order specific liquors in bars or have neighbors praise particular brands of condiments or sneakers at parties (Heilbrunn 2005).
Relevant issues for our discussion are whether and to what extent marketers are willing to engage in activities that lack transparency. Few academic studies have tackled this difficult subject, providing only anecdotal evidence that the practice is more widespread than one might suspect. To address this deficit, Zinkhan, Bisessi, and Saxton (1989) asked a sample of MBA students about their willingness to deceive in a number of marketing contexts and found a broad readiness to do so in order to ensure cooperation by consumers. While the generalizability of their findings is limited, such behaviors suggest that some marketers seek to limit our understanding of their true intentions (Jeurissen and van de Ven 2006).
For better or for worse, opportunities to influence consumers without their full awareness may increase significantly as a result of research on brain activity. Almost twenty years ago, consumer scholars recommended using brain wave measures to study the impact of promotions on buyer behavior (see Young 2002). This perspective was controversial, especially given limitations and difficulties interpreting data from electroencephalograms (Stewart 1984, 1985). However, over this period, the disciplines of neuroscience and cognitive psychology advanced and joined forces to provide an entirely new paradigm for understanding ways consumers develop, store, retrieve, and use information (Gordon 2002). Neuroscience methodologies, especially noninvasive neuroimaging technology, now enable researchers to probe brain activity at the basic neural level of functioning (Shiv et al. 2005).
The use of data obtained from brain imaging poses ethical dilemmas for marketers. Potential moral issues emerging from neuroscience applications include awareness, consent, and understanding of individual consumers. The next section explores scientific literature on the brain, followed by a discussion of neuromarketing within models of marketing persuasion. The article then describes ethical dilemmas involving the free will paradigm argued historically in moral philosophy along with Rawlsian justice. Anticipating our results, we find that the new technology may spawn difficult ethical situations, and we offer policy implications for the future, with the intent of incorporating advantages of neuroscience within the boundaries of ethical marketing.
NEUROMARKETING AND NEUROIMAGING
The term "neuromarketing" (NM) is a recently invented moniker. The Economist (2004) credits Jerry Zaltman with initially proposing a union of brain-imaging technology with marketing in the late 1990s, and when the Atlanta marketing firm, BrightHouse, opened a neuromarketing division in 2001, the synthesis of neuroscience and marketing began to attract attention in science, business, and journalism. Neuromarketing has been described as "applying the methods of the neurology lab to the questions of the advertising world" (Thompson 2003, 53). Recently, the International Journal of Psychophysiology called neuromarketing "the application of neuroscientific methods to analyze and understand human behavior in relation to markets and marketing exchanges" (Lee, Broderick, and Chamberlain 2007, 200). Indeed, improvements in neuroimaging technologies have and will continue to advance our knowledge of how people make decisions and how marketers can influence those decisions.
The use of one noninvasive neuroimaging technology, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has experienced especially rapid growth. IMRI enables researchers to isolate systems of neurons associated with functions of the brain. For example, when a person looks at a print advertisement, light activates some of the 125 million visual neural receptors, rods and cones, in each eye. Nerve signals travel to the midbrain, which focuses the pupils and coordinates eye movement over the advertisement. Other signals from the rods and cones pass through the optic nerve fibers, some of which cross-over to the other side of the brain so that the left half of the advertisement is perceived in the right hemisphere of the brain and the right half in the left hemisphere (Carey 2005; Dubuc 2007).
The information is processed for shape, color, and spatial location as the signals pass through the lateral geniculate nuclei on their way to assembly in the visual cortices located at the back of the brain. Memories triggered by an advertisement are stored throughout the cerebral cortex and recalled through the hippocampus located deep in each brain hemisphere; the stored emotional memories and valences are processed by the amygdala, another nerve bundle located near the base of each hemisphere (Carey 2005 Dalgleish 2004; Davidson 2003; Dubuc 2007; Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell 2000). Using fMRI, researchers are able to image the neural activity associated with vision as well as with the cognitive and affective responses to print advertisements.
Isolating neural systems formed by the one hundred billion neurons in the human brain is a complex task. fMRI is able to locate active systems by comparing images taken of a brain performing a specific function to those of the brain when not performing that function. In an active neural system, signals travel from one neuron to another by transmitting chemical compounds, called neurotransmitters, across synapses to receptors on the receiving cell. Neurotransmitters attaching to the receptors can either facilitate or inhibit a process that will result in the firing of electrical impulses that stimulates release of neurotransmitters into synapses to the receptors of the next cell (Carey 2005; Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell 2000). Synaptic activity of the activated network of neurons causes blood to flow to the region (Logothetis 2003; Raichle and Mintun 2006). The additional blood brings more oxygen and hydrogen to the area than is needed to replenish the system of neurons, which increases the magnetic field during a scan by a small but detectable amount (Gore 2003; Matthews and Jezzard 2004).
Improvements in hardware and software technologies continue to increase the spatial and temporal resolutions of the images, that is, the clarity of each image and the accuracy of tracking changes in brain activity over time based on these small changes in magnetic field. Current magnetic resonance imaging machines generate a 1.5-T strong magnetic force (30,000 times the force of gravity). The protons in the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the brain, primarily located in the blood, align their axes with this strong magnetic force. A radio wave pulse of appropriate frequency is applied at an angle to the aligned axes causing the oscillating protons to absorb energy and tip their axes away from alignment with the strong force. When the pulse ends, the particles release the absorbed energy as they return to alignment with the magnetic force. This released energy is the measured magnetic resonance signal. The information in these signals is then converted via computer software into an image of a slice of the brain. The resulting image is different from a photograph or an X-ray; it is a representation of contrasts among different tissues based on the density of the hydrogen protons and the nature of the tissue containing the protons (Detre and Wang 2002; Gore 2003; Heuttel, Song, and McCarthy 2004; Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell 2000; Patz 2007).
During an fMRI experiment, researchers...
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