The Econ­o­mist has a fas­ci­nat­ing and eye-opening arti­cle look­ing at the ‘sci­ence of shop­ping’. Mind Hacks reviews the arti­cle:

The piece dis­cusses the psy­chol­ogy of big store mar­ket­ing, touch­ing on three areas: store lay­out and envi­ron­ment design, ‘neu­ro­mar­ket­ing’ and cus­tomer tracking.

It’s inter­est­ing that much of the fuss in the media has focused on ‘neu­ro­mar­ket­ing’ — the use of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science to under­stand con­sumer behav­iour — when it is clear from this arti­cle that it is really quite impo­tent in the face of the two other pow­er­ful techniques.

Neu­ro­mar­ket­ing is largely the study of finan­cial deci­sion mak­ing and typ­i­cally relies on cor­re­lat­ing brain activ­ity with sim­u­lated con­sumer purchasing.

The idea is that it will explain how we make pur­chase deci­sions and will give us access to some of the uncon­scious process that are at work. Once we under­stand these, it could lead mar­keters to new tech­niques that we would never have dis­cov­ered by study­ing behav­iour or opin­ions alone.