Brainpower and Business: How Neuroscience Gets Inside Your Head
When was the last time you actually thought about how you think?
Elizabeth Zab Johnson, executive director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is all about brainpower. She likes to say that her team’s research helps people, businesses and society think broadly about the three-pound organ inside our heads and how it might impact our work and our lives.
That mission takes on powerful meaning these days as artificial intelligence enables computers to learn tasks in ways that mimic human intelligence. How can the two – grey matter and machine design — work together efficiently and effectively? And how might that combination improve business insights and operations?
The Wharton Neuroscience Initiative partners with companies to research questions like this. Michael Platt, founder and director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and a Wharton and Penn professor of marketing and neuroscience, believes that neuroscience can have a major impact on business in everything from marketing and brand strategy to leadership. He is a driving force behind the science of neuroeconomics, to help us better understand decisions in all these areas. He and his colleagues regularly collect data to demonstrate the value of using a neuroscience approach to solve challenges in business.
Analyzing the Effects of Advertising
A recent example of this is the Neuroscience Initiative’s research partnership with RMT (Research Measurement Technologies), an AI-based motivational analytics system led by senior executives with backgrounds in media, entertainment and advertising. RMT introduces disruptive technologies into these industries to improve outcomes, such as the return on investment for agencies that create advertising to sell products and services.
RMT has been working with the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative on a big advertising study that links neural signals in the brain to inner experiences of brand valuation. The ultimate goal: helping brands grow by understanding how consumers make choices.
In a recent press release related to the research, Bill Harvey, the chairman of RMT, talked about some of their discoveries. The results of the current study have shown, for example, that television environments produce far higher levels of the four sales-predictive brain measures (memory, brain attention, approach, and synchrony,) compared to digital environments.
“In the last 10-year shift to digital media, fewer than one in five major brands have grown market share,” Harvey noted. “Digital direct response capabilities have been used to reap immediate sales, but this has slowed brand growth itself. Brands grow when they resonate with the motivations of customers. This requires storytelling, more than fast flickers of attention.”
Put on Your Thinking Caps
More to come from this Wharton-industry research collab, including some new-age, high-tech data gathering.
In the last few years, the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative – and more specifically Dr. Platt – has helped to develop quality wearable neurotechnology. “A whole variety of gizmos are coming to market,” noted Professor Platt during a conversation with Wharton’s Eric Bradlow. “Combining that with advances in AI and machine learning puts us in a position to really capitalize on the ability to measure brain activity in the real world at scale – thousands, maybe millions of people – in a much wider array of activities than is possible in the laboratory.”
Wharton Neuroscience’s brand-focused research with RMT is moving into that high-tech head space. “Because of Dr. Platt’s contribution to the development of Cogwear, highly accurate EEG headbands [that] can be used in people’s own homes, we’re looking forward to a series of studies in homes rather than in the lab,” said Jin Ho Yun, post-doctoral researcher at the Wharton School who is working on the RMT studies. “This will enable measurement of natural exposure to advertising and will be linked to household level sales data.”
Conversation Starters
How are Michael Platt and his colleagues using a neuroscience approach to tackle the challenge of creating more effective advertising to improve brand value?
What is cogwear and how is it helping to improve data collection for the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative?
Do you think organic intelligence and artificial intelligence can co-exist and even achieve synchrony? Tell us more in the comment section of this article.
Hero Image Credit: Anthony Tran, Unsplash