Neuromarketing Standards Draft

Sent along by Ron Wright of Sands Research:

Thank you for attending the Advertising Week NeuroMarketing Forum!

As promised, we are sending you the ARF's white paper summarizing the findings and recommendations from our NeuroStandards Collaboration Project. (This is a pre-production version; a bound, printed version will be available later.)

As you will see in the attached draft of the NeuroMarketing White Paper, the findings are encouraging for the future of neuromarketing as a major player in the advertising research portfolio of any major company. While there are clearly debates to be resolved and additional progress that is needed, we believe three things are certain:

• Measuring the emotional and unconscious response to advertising is imperative in order to drive effective advertising.
• Traditional advertising research methods are simply not going to give us the insights needed to address these decisive factors in consumer choice.
• Neuromarketing methods already offer excellent capabilities in understanding emotional arousal and getting around cognitive biases like "social desirability," and some provide promising capabilities in assessing sentiment (valence), desire, and memory encoding.  

To be sure, a lot of the same considerations that we face in traditional research are no less relevant for neuromarketing studies, when they are to be used as quantitative research: sample size/statistical confidence, the value of experimental design, etc. But, even if large sample sizes are simply not economically or logistically feasible, we should also not be afraid to use neuromarketing techniques qualitatively and early in the creative process. The rewards will quickly become apparent.

Now we move on to phase 2 of NeuroStandards, “How Advertising Works Today” (a.k.a., Neuro 2.0). If the ultimate goal of advertising research is to increase the productivity of advertising investments, quantitative ad research measures with predictive validity across a broad range of products and services are a must. The need for this is as great for traditional measures as it is for the newer ones. The ARF’s “Copy Research Validity Project” published in 1991 was a path-breaking first step in this direction.  But with our new insights about emotion and the emergence of new research options for understanding it, it’s time for a new, robust, comprehensive, definitive evaluation of predictive validity for traditional, neuromarketing, and other “implicit” approaches. That’s what “How Advertising Works Today” (a.k.a. Neuro 2.0) is all about. The first Forum will be on December 7, more information will soon be on the ARF website.
  
Many thanks for your interest in and support of the ARF and NeuroStandards ....