Every year, we look forward to how the Super Bowl ads stacked up from a neuromarketing standpoint, courtesy of Sands Research. It’s taken a little longer this year, but the results are in! Pepsi Dominates One company, Pepsi, swept the top two spots this year. Their “Kings Court” and “Pepsi Max Checkout” ranked #1 and [...]

Those of us involved in social media know that people love to talk about themselves. They seemingly enjoy sharing the trivial, the personal, and occasionally the weird, details of their lives. Sometimes they overshare – as a longtime online community builder, I’ve found that “poster’s remorse” is common – people post something too personal and [...]

Do web searchers pay attention to the domain where the link in the search results leads them? A few years ago, I would have said “no.” For years, I’ve operated or advised websites that ranked at or near the top for various brand names, and found many users assumed the site WAS that brand. Even [...]

Here’s another rare foray into neuro-parenting. In How to Praise Your Child, I described research that showed telling your child he/she is smart could actually backfire and have negative effects on performance. It turns out there’s another kind of encouragement that can hurt performance rather than improve it. Group vs. Individual New research published in [...]

For years neuromarketing firms have been selling their services to help advertisers optimize TV commercials, product packaging, and other media. While these companies all claim success in helping their clients boost sales, there’s been little in the way of published academic research that demonstrates measuring consumer brain activity can reliably predict subsequent behavior. A new [...]

As long as banner ads have been on websites, the number of clicks they garner has been the most important performance metric for an ad. Ads that get fewer clicks are canned in favor of those that get more. I questioned this (with Seth Godin’s unwitting help) a few years ago in College Branding and [...]

Do you find chunks of your day consumed by less than productive activities? Updating Twitter? Checking Facebook? Clicking on those fascinating links posted by your friends? Checking sports scores or stock prices? Catching up on the latest hilarity from DamnYouAutoCorrect? None of these are bad things, but when you have important tasks to complete these [...]

One of the common questions I’m asked at conferences and by reporters is whether neuromarketing techniques are ethical, or whether they are just one more way to manipulate consumers into buying stuff they don’t need. My response to this is to ask whether boring or annoying ads are preferable to ads that the viewer finds [...]

Book Review: How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It by Mark Cuban If you aspire to be a corporate drone marking time until five o’clock, or until retirement, don’t bother reading Mark Cuban’s new book, How to Win at the Sport of Business. If you [...]

It’s that time of year when many U.S. high school seniors are making their final college decisions. They have their last acceptance letters, and now must choose which school they will attend in the fall. It’s a good time to think about how the college search process begins, and how the choice architecture of the [...]