Years ago, when The Tonight Show ruled late-night TV and when all the guests weren’t celebrities promoting their latest book, movie, or TV show, host Johnny Carson interviewed the Girl Scout who sold the most cookies that year. This young lady, Markita Andrews, set a cookie-sales record that has yet to be broken. [...]

Very soon, we will be subjected to a variety of neuromarketing-based opinions on which Super Bowl 2010 ads worked, and which didn’t. While we are awaiting these analyses, I thought I’d point readers at a good article on one kind of neuromarketing study methodology by WIRED writer Alexis Madrigal. It’s accurate, largely devoid [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the latest anti-neuromarketing flap in Guard Your Reptilian Brain! While researching that post, I found an interesting spinoff at another site, Progressives, South Bend. I initially couldn’t find the text “neuromarketing” on that page. When I searched the page text, I found what looked like a short horizontal [...]

Every year or so, some fuzzy-thinking critic reads an article about neuromarketing, becomes extremely agitated, and tries to raise the alarm about marketers turning consumers into mind-controlled zombies. The latest push of the neuro-panic button began with an article on a site called Truthout (fresh out of truth, perhaps?). Truthout seems to be a [...]

Every year, there is a burst of neuromarketing-related activity coinciding with the Super Bowl. After all, that game features commercials that people actually watch, and the cost of airing each ad is the highest of any program throughout the entire year. One staple of Super Bowl Sunday is the party – millions will [...]

Trivia question: Why were local phone numbers originally seven digits long? The answer is that in the early days of local phone service, researchers found that seven digit numbers were about as long as most people could remember without forgetting or making errors. (One oft-quoted study on the “seven” topic is The Magical [...]

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…” “On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students…” Advertising buffs will instantly recognize these two opening lines. The first is from an [...]

Billboards can be an effective medium, but tend to be very low in viewer engagement. Most outdoor advertising is designed to be viewed in a second or less as motorists whiz by. Here’s an example of how one advertiser turned that idea upside-down to create a fully interactive billboard:As shown in the video, [...]

“Green marketing” usually refers to using an environmental pitch to sell a product. A car creates less pollution, a paper product is made from recycled content, and so on. Results of appealing to environmental sentiment have been mixed. On one hand, the Toyota Prius has sold better than would be justified purely [...]

Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs, with food being at the most basic level of biological need and shelter one step above as part of a “safety” need. He may have been on the right track, according to new research led by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University. [...]