Here's a podcast of a fascinating interview with Tim Ambler of the London Business School on the potential of neuroscience to improve our understanding of how marketing works. It's worth five minutes of your time.
Ambler argues, in his pleasingly robust style, that most market research is based on a false premise: that we make our consumption choices rationally. The truth is, everything that we've learned about how our brains work in the last few years points to the overwhelming dominance of our unconscious, emotional brains in decision-making (if you haven't read this superb book, you must). But the in-built bias towards rational analysis in marketing (neither consumers nor marketers like to believe that they proceed largely by feeling and intuition) inhibits our investigation of what's really going on.
He makes the intriguing suggestion that marketers ought to work with scientists to investigate autism, because autistic people either lack, or display extreme versions of, universal human traits that marketers rely on or attempt to tap into (a pronounced tendency to entrenched habit and routine on the one hand, a lack of emotional empathy on the other).
