Activating the Lizard Brain

Posted 2009.06.02

I met up with Dr. Carl Marci, CEO of Innerscope last week. Innerscope is a fascinating company with roots in psychiatry and neurology. Dr. Marci is an emerging leader in the relatively new field of neuroscience and neuromarketing.

Innerscope use new tracking technology to analyze how media stimuli result in behavior. This has allowed them to prove that the old model of advertising where people receive a stimulus, think about it and then decide on how that will affect their behavior is inaccurate. Instead people receive stimuli that may or may not pass the emotional filter we all have deep inside our brain. Only if the stimulus triggers an emotional response, it can also generate a rational response. After that, behavior is changed as a result of a complex interplay between rationality and emotion, both of which can reinforce each other.

The main difference about this model is that “feeling” generally precedes “thinking” and “doing”. This is why Innerscope have developed a set of diagnostics that measure how emotionally engaging media stimuli are. They do this through measuring 4 physical changes people experience when emotionally engaged :

– Skin Conductance : changes in sweat levels of the palms

– Respiration : changes in our breathing patterns

– Heart response : changes in our heart rate

– Movement : changes in physical movement

Innerscope measures this through a specially designed vest their respondents wear during the research. The vest has built in sensors that track these metrics while a person is watching TV, browsing the web or even walking through a store.

These biometric diagnostics measure activity in the oldest parts of our brain – the “lizard brain”. This gives Innerscope data points on the unfiltered emotions a person experiences when exposed to certain stimuli. They use these data points to measure levels of emotional engagement communications generate.

Innerscope have correlated emotional engagement of TV shows with TV ratings. With regard to TV ads they found that the more emotionally engaged viewers, are less likely to fast forward the ads on their Tivo. They also found that even when viewers fast forward ads, they still process content emotionally for ads that have a high emotional engagement. Emotional engagement also plays an important role in the effectiveness of in-store experiences, online buzz, print ads, websites and packaging.

Innerscope complement the biometric diagnostics with advanced eye tracking which provides data on how well people receive media stimuli and with more traditional research techniques that measure the rational responses.

Neuromarketing is not only providing us with deep insights about how communications works. It is also questioning the importance the market research industry has traditionally attached to rational behavior. If rationality only has a minor impact on behavior change, why are we spending so much time asking consumers about what they thought of our communications and how that affected their behavior? We should probably focus more of our energy on getting a better understanding of the emotional engagement our communications create.