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This is your brain. This is your brain in the marketing department. Any questions?
Jean Piaget has been dead 22 years. But the pioneering child psychologist is still inspiring breakthroughs � like better ways to sell Heinz EZ Squirt ketchup to 10-year-olds. The blazingly colorful, frantically edited TV commercials for EZ Squirt could have come straight from Piaget�s theories of child development and sensory experience. According to an account executive at KidLeo, a division of the ad agency Leo Burnett, "big kids" are wired for extreme visual stimulation, and that�s why the Heinz ads have been so huge.
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Piaget is only the beginning. Just as the pharmaceutical industry steers medical research, marketing and advertising are beginning to guide the way scholars investigate brain function, perception, and language. Cognitive science course catalogs are studded with classes on branding, marketing, and advertising. Faculty lounges from MIT to the University of Indiana are filling up with profs who specialize in the psychology of acquisition and the science of material desire. Even such relatively obscure institutions as Mississippi State University offer programs like "Cognitive Science Approaches to Marketing and Product Usability."
COGNITIVE SCIENCE GOES COMMERCIAL
Cognitive science, which draws on psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science, has an illustrious history. The discipline has brought us innovations in artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and neural networking.
But increasingly, it�s about ketchup. Cognitive science isn�t just being put to work for better marketing � it�s also helping to make more sophisticated products. There�s cog-sci fieldwork behind cereal ads, and lab experiments support the marketing of jeans. Cognitive scientists are investigating why kids might feel positive about, say, Coke but hate Pepsi; or why Zoog is a catchy add-on to the Disney brand.
One example: At the University of Texas at Austin, cognitive science professor Art Markman gave a group of hungry people a few bites of popcorn. Another group got no food. Then he showed his volunteers pictures of products � DVD players, shampoo, cars, French toast. The group whose appetite had been whetted with popcorn had a harder time concentrating on the nonfoods. One obvious implication, Markman says: Food samples may actually hurt nongrocery sales. And in Australia, researchers are using a brain-imaging technique called steady-state probe topography to monitor volunteers watching TV commercials. It turns out viewers respond better to ads with longer scenes between cuts. The lesson here: MTV-style quick cuts may be cool, but they distract viewers from the message. (Paging Heinz: "Anticipation" may be better after all.)
Blame it on a preemptive midlife crisis. Cog sci isn�t the hot young discipline it was back in 1979, when the first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held in San Diego. The field now needs to attract more students. There�s a new push for relevance. Recently, the University of Indiana promised that undergrads who major in cognitive and information studies wouldn�t graduate to become underemployed eggheads. Rather, they�d learn "useful applications" � like marketing and advertising.
HAVE THE RESEARCHERS GONE TOO FAR?
Hitching all this academic horsepower to the commercial marketplace can seem pretty sinister, and some in the field are worried. Julie Sedivy, a professor of cognitive psychology at Brown, says her colleagues have gone too far into the pockets of advertisers and marketers � and she�s fighting back. She uses psycholinguistics to teach "critical thinking about language processing and advertising." The goal is to get students interested in the regulation of advertising, especially ads aimed at kids.
It�s not hard to imagine where cog-sci research may be leading us. Fieldwork at Ford dealerships? A Toys "R" Us Department of Cognitive Science? On a dark day not too far in the future, there may well be a team of academics monitoring the effect of Gogurt on the hippocampus. And you can bet KidLeo account executives will be taking notes.
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