How should marketting use understanding of the brain mechanisms of social influence to sell more?

Our 3rd session's paper claims that understanding the brain mechanisms of social influence have important implications for marketting and advertising. The question is now that this project has been completed and the experiments done and paper published what can marketting get from it that we did not know before the project? How should marketting USE this new information to do things better? To sell more what does this paper tell marketing?

What kinds of emotions encourage the consumer to purchase special commodities? The paper shows the firms a straight way leading to encourage the consumers to use their services. As mentioned in this study (our journal club), if researches come to this conclusion that liked people’s preferences have a long-lasting effect on changing the consumers’ choice, manufacturers can try to use popular people in their ads while they are using their goods or use disliked people while they are avoiding them. This is in comparison to using inanimate stuffs or neutral people that make weak or temporary effects. Maybe using the concept of mother in teasers is an unintentional use of this outcome.

The study says that the more your preference is far from a liked person’s, the more your preference would change towards him and vice versa for a hated person. So for example if a producer of home fitness apparatus wants to encourage fat and lazy people whose preferences are too far from buying the apparatus, he can show how much fat people are disliked in the society and especially by those who are liked by fat people. I mean that the ­OBJECT in the cognitive imbalance triangle could be one type of people instead of the specific advertised goods. Taking advantage of this study outcome, firms can conduct indirect advertisements which are not noticed clearly by consumers. In this way while they are actually encourage people to use their services, they avoid consumers’ unpleasant feeling towards direct advertising.

Business transactions surely involves more than a person; it involves other people and even the whole environment. So it is important to understand how people interact with each other or let’s say how the brain interacts with the environment. Standard economic theory assumes it is impossible to directly measure the feelings of the human heart or find out details about the functioning of the brain’s black box, rather feelings could only be assessed from behavior. Contrary to this, neuroscience has proved that the study of the brain and nervous system is beginning to allow direct measurement of thoughts and feelings, hence predicting the behavior. These measurements can, in turn, revise our understanding of the relation between mind and action, leading to new theories and calling old ones into question.

Session 3 | Social Manipulation of Preference in the Human Brain

It's a rainy day in Tehran!

Today we discussed : Izuma, Keise, and Ralph Adolphs. "Social Manipulation of Preference in the Human Brain." Neuron 78.3 (2013)

Rahele presented the paper for us, We believe that what makes this paper different from other resembling researches is its emphasis on "Balance Theory".

We discussed paper's experimental protocol, and we derived to this part :

We hypothesized that posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC),which includes dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA), lays a key role in representing imbalanced states and subsequent preference change.

Bahador mentioned that their conjecture of pMFC's role in social imbalance is because pMFC answers to asymmetric situations.

We talked about the "fixed effect analysis" statistical technique which is used in figure 3.
Finally there are questions which people are going to write about and discuss :

1. How to represent this data in terms of balance theory?
2. Given what we know, what do we understand from marketing and advertising?

Session 2 | In the Mind of the Market: Theory of Mind Biases Value Computation during Financial Bubbles

In our second session Ali presented : De Martino, Benedetto, et al. "In the Mind of the Market: Theory of Mind Biases Value Computation during Financial Bubbles." Neuron 79.6 (2013)