Caution needed on neuroscience

NEW YORK: Marketers need to be cautious about moving onto the brightest and shiniest neuroscientific tools in supporting their research efforts, according to Rachel Kennedy and Haydn Northover of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

In How to Use Neuromeasures To Make Better Advertising Decisions – Questions Practitioners Should Ask Vendors and Research Priorities for Scholars – appearing in the latest edition of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) – Kennedy and Northover advise marketers to be wary of the early over-promise of neuroscience.

Traditional measures of effectiveness, they assert, are often insufficient as a means to "fully understand response to advertising". Neuroscience offers new possibilities in this area, but is not an infallible guide.