marketingmag.com.au36 INTERVIEW
“You can’t use eye tracking as a
proxy for attention... you can’t use
the brain or behaviours to measure
attention.”
So what’s a better way to know if
someone’s paying attention to you?
“Ask them!”
Whether it’s emotions, memories
or attention, the humble question is
still put forward by Cooney Horvath
as the best way to measure what
someone’s thinking.
It has been noted that in
questionnaires and surveys,
people are known to sometimes
provide inaccurate answers, and
so some marketers may not use
them anymore.
“They go ‘oh [respondents] are
going to lie, they don’t know why
they’re making these decisions’,”
says Cooney Horvath, of the
marketers with doubts about their
subjects’ questionnaire results.
“Trust me,” he adds, “if the
person doesn’t know, their brain’s
not going to know. You’re not going
to magically fi nd the answer in
their breathing pattern or in skin
galvanics, lie detectors, in the brain
or in the body”.
“If they don’t know and they’re
not going to tell you, you’re not going
to fi nd out.”
- QUACKERY!
THE STORY: basically the entire
practice of neuromarketing
The truth: neuromarketing
seems to be, if we listen to
Cooney Horvath, all bogus.
Marketers should be sceptical of
anyone selling neuromarketing.
“The fi rst question you ask anyone
who says they’re a neuromarketer
MARKETING 2019is ‘Great, where did you get your
neuroscience degree?’
“Ninety-nine percent will say,
‘Oh, I didn’t’, because they don’t do
neuroscience, they do marketing.”
Cooney Horvath gets a little
indignant at this point. “There are
people who devote years of their
lives to earning the right to say ‘I
understand neuroscience.’
“If you read a book, that doesn’t
make you a neuroscientist. If you
watch Brain Games, that doesn’t
make you a neuroscientist. If you
once saw a picture of a brain, if
you once saw the movie Lucy, that
doesn’t make you a neuroscientist.”
Brain speak is commonly used
to sell pitches and delight would-be
clients. ‘Neuro’ is, in a sense, a
tempting buzzword. “The fact that
I said ‘neuro’ makes you want to
believe it more,” he says of the
neuroenchantment phenomenon.
At the end of the day, however,
it sounds like even the latest
in neuroscience takes a rather
exploratory view of the brain and how
it works. “Any neuro [who] claims that
we can do X, Y and Z with the brain are
lying to you, because no one can prove
anything with the brain at this point.”
Originally, neuroscience’s aim
was to crack the brain “like a code”.
Practitioners believed “once I had your
brain mapped, I could solve you.”
“That’s just not how this game
ended up working,” Cooney Horvathsays. Today, neuroscience aims
to describe the brain, and to seek
potential cures and treatments for
diseases.
When applied to marketing, it
sounds like the best neuroscience
can do is confi rm what we already
know. “The only thing neuroscience
can supply is the underlying
mechanisms of why some things
work or don’t work.
“So as a marketer, you know
which ads work well and which
ones don’t. You have ideas as to
what’s going to hit and what’s not
going to hit. Neuroscience can
come in and say ‘here’s why that
one hit, and here’s why that one
doesn’t hit’.”
So is there some glimmer of
hope for applying neuroscience in
your next big strategic move? “Once
you know the why, then you can own
the techniques with a little bit more
footing and can manipulate them
with a little more agency, a little more
purpose,” says Cooney Horvath.
“But it doesn’t change what you
already knew.”
He remains sceptical, and
believes it shouldn’t change
marketing. The millions of dollars
and hours invested into better
understanding the brain in the name
of scientifi c research makes sense,
but, in marketing, “you haven’t got the
time and it’s defi nitely going to cut
into your bottom line”.
Final thought on neuromarketers?
“All they’re doing is repackaging stuff
you have known for decades and
selling it back to you... trust your own
intuition, trust your own experience,
trust your own training and you’ll
do better than anyone with an EEG
machine. Every day of the week.”All they’re doing
is repackaging stuff
you have known for
decades and selling
it back to you.