NeuroFocus Uses Neuromarketing To Hack Your Brain

Orange cheese dust. That wholly unnatural neon stuff that gloms onto your fingers when you're mindlessly snacking on chips or doodles. The stuff you don't think about until you realize you've smeared it on your shirt or couch cushions--and then keep on eating anyway, despite your better intentions. Orange cheese dust is probably not the first thing you think of when talking about how the brain functions, but it's exactly the kind of thing that makes NeuroFocus, and neuromarketing in general, such a potentially huge and growing business. In 2008, Frito-Lay hired NeuroFocus to look into Cheetos, the junk-food staple. After scanning the brains of a carefully chosen group of consumers, the NeuroFocus team discovered that the icky coating triggers an unusually powerful response in the brain: a sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product. In other words, the sticky stuff is what makes those snacks such a sticky brand. Frito-Lay leveraged that information into its advertising campaign for Cheetos, which has made the most of the mess. For its efforts, NeuroFocus earned a Grand Ogilvy award for advertising research, given out by the Advertising Research Foundation, for "demonstrating the most successful use of research in the creation of superior advertising that achieves a critical business objective."

via FastCompany