Abstract
In this chapter, a number of key ethical issues associated with the recent emergence of the related fields of neuromarketing and sensory marketing are reviewed. Now that these new techniques are really starting to show their predictive mettle relative to other, more traditional, consumer psychology/behavioural testing approaches to marketing, questions around the ethics of stimulating the brain’s “buy button” start to raise their head. Here, I want to question what exactly is so special, and so worrying, about “looking inside the mind of the consumer”. I will argue that public fears around the dangers of neuromarketing have been overblown, at least up until the present time and, as far as I can see, for the foreseeable future. I do, though, want to raise a number of concerns around the growing influence of sensory marketing on our behaviour, focusing, in particular, on the world of food and drink marketing. Ultimately, I believe that the consumer of tomorrow may well have much to fear from the emerging neuroscience-inspired approaches to sensory marketing. In fact, before too long, we may all start to find ourselves being sensorially “nudged” into a range of less healthy food behaviours. As such, establishing clear ethical guidelines will, I believe, become an increasingly important issue for those working in the field.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Madan (2010), the term “neuromarketing” was first coined by Ale Smidts, in 2002, in an inaugural university address (Smidts 2002). That said, Anonymous (2004) suggests that the term was already in use by Gerry Zaltman in the closing years of the last century. The BrightHouse Institute, though, were the first to use the term in print (see Anonymous 2002).
- 2.
Though, as Blakeslee (2004) wryly notes in the title of her article: “If you have a ‘buy button’ in your brain, what pushes it?”.
- 3.
Just take the conclusion from one newspaper article entitled “Admen seek ‘buy button’ in our brains” (Winnett n.d.): “A trip to the local supermarket or car showroom could soon become a psychological challenge with shoppers fighting subconscious urges that are manipulated by the marketers”.
- 4.
Referencing the original, John Bunyard published The Honest Persuaders in 2010.
- 5.
According to one industry commentator, “in focus groups, some people want to please, others to dominate—urges that can influence their choices. In interviews, consumers often say what they think the interviewer wants to hear” [Tim Partlin of Lieberman Research Worldwide, quoted in Blakeslee (2004: 5)].
- 6.
It is unclear quite what the “experiments” in the second sentence is really supposed to refer to here, given that both behavioural scientists and cognitive neuroscientists would, I imagine, insist that they conducted experiments. One could, I think, also legitimately claim that certain neuroimaging techniques, specifically event-related potentials, should actually be considered as traditional given that marketing and advertising researchers have been using them for almost half a century (e.g. Krugman 1971; Weinstein 1981; Weinstein et al. 1980).
- 7.
- 8.
Note that it is not that I see no use for the use of so-called “implicit” behavioural tests like the IAT, for business (e.g. Parise and Spence 2012). In fact, we have often used it over the years in our industry-funded research (Demattè et al. 2006, 2007b). It is just that I want to question their incorporation into the gamut of neuroimaging techniques.
- 9.
According to an analysis conducted by Fisher et al. (2010), GSR is a particularly popular product offering amongst many neuromarketing companies.
- 10.
As Chris Jarrett (2015) put it when describing a purported neuromarketing study claiming to be able to predict block-busters using heart rate, skin conductance, and breathing, “This wasn’t genuine neuromarketing—it was really just wiring people up to some basic physiological measures to see how excited they were by a movie trailer”.
- 11.
Facebook teamed up with academic researchers in order to conduct a study in which they intentionally manipulated 689,000 users’ mood states without their knowledge or consent. Specifically, the social network controlled the news feed of users over a 1-week period back in 2012. They carefully managed which emotional expressions Facebook users were exposed to. When the peer-reviewed, and ethics board-approved, study came out detailing the findings, the company was subject to a major public backlash. People were angered that the company had not acquired people’s informed consent prior to their taking part in the study (see BBC 2014a, b).
- 12.
According to Javor et al. (2013: 1), “We argue for a differentiated terminology, naming commercial applications of neuroscientific methods ‘neuro-marketing’ and scientific ones ‘consumer neuro-science’”.
- 13.
I have it on good authority that certain of the neuromarketers whose research was discussed in Lindstrom’s (2008) book, Buy-ology, were less than happy with the way in which their scientific results were “twisted” to fit a particular marketing story!
- 14.
That said, given the replication crisis that is currently sweeping psychology (e.g. Francis 2014; Ioannidis et al. 2014; Open Science Collaboration 2015), not to mention many other disciplines (Ioannides 2005), one can legitimately question how many of the results that end up making it into the press are really robust.
- 15.
Though, as Brammer (2004) notes, the absence of any commercial fMRI machines in the UK means that all neuroimaging studies using this technique will likely have had to gain ethical approval prior to the start of data collection anyway. The situation is obviously very different when it comes to ERP research given the much cheaper cost of entry to the field.
- 16.
In fact, Wagner (2003: 23) starts his paper: “Few researchers at the beginning of the twenty-first century would submit a report of research involving human subjects without first obtaining review from an ethical review board”.
- 17.
Research ethics wise, there could be issues in some countries where standards of research ethics imply that research will be of sufficient quality to justify any risks to research subjects (otherwise the risk is not justified). However, this depends on the underlying ethical code relied on in the country where the study is conducted.
- 18.
And the marketers are by no means exceptional in this regard: According to psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, “I’ve worked with large companies and asked decision makers how often they base an important professional decision on that gut feeling. In the companies I’ve worked with, which are large international companies, about 50% of all decisions are at the end a gut decision” (quoted in Fox 2014).
- 19.
Here, it may be that the majority of the published examples of nudging would seem to be targeted at societally desirable behaviours, such as donating our organs or saving more for our retirements. By contrast, much of the discussion around neuromarketing has focused on corporate greed.
- 20.
Kroese et al. (2016) conducted a study in three snack shops located in train stations. They assessed whether the customers could be nudged towards healthier food choices simply by moving the fruit closer to the check-out till than the snacks—the reverse normally being the case. The “nudge” worked in the sense that people were indeed more likely to buy a piece of fruit or a muesli bar. That said, those customers whose behaviour was assessed continued to purchase snacks like crisps, cookies, and chocolate as well. In other words, an intervention that was designed to cut people’s consumption may actually have resulted in their purchasing more calories instead.
- 21.
In passing, one might also consider “the free lunch” as but another long-standing example of sensory marketing. Once again, the ethics of this particular appeal to the senses are questionable, at least to the extent that it is assumed to influence decision-making via the stomach rather than the rational mind (see Anonymous 1972; Farrell 1965; Halvorson and Rudelius 1977, for an early discussion of the topic), which the latest evidence suggests it most definitely does (see Spence 2016a, b, for a review).
- 22.
One of the only examples comes from the Milk Advertising Board in California who were forced to remove their cookie-scented adverts from bus shelters because it was deemed insensitive to homeless people who might use the shelters to sleep in (Cuneo 2006). Meanwhile, a couple of decades ago, attempts to scent the London Underground were also met by hostility from Londoners, and the scheme was soon abandoned too (see Spence 2002). These findings suggest that one can go too far with specifically olfactory marketing.
- 23.
Worrying, both because of the seeming effectiveness of these kinds of interventions and because of most consumers’ lack of awareness that exogenous factors are biasing their decisions/behaviour. As a case in point, just think about the increasingly obesogenic environment in which the increasingly obese populace finds itself.
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Disclosure Statement
Over the last two decades, Prof. Spence has consulted with many of the world’s largest companies on the topics of neuromarketing and sensory marketing. He has published psychophysical and neuromarketing studies of the Lynx effect on behalf of Unilever. This research is referred to in this chapter.
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Spence, C. (2020). On the Ethics of Neuromarketing and Sensory Marketing. In: Martineau, J., Racine, E. (eds) Organizational Neuroethics. Advances in Neuroethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27177-0_3
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