15 Nisan 2011 Cuma

Neuroscience author describes consumer mind for Turkish business


GÖKHAN KURTARAN
Neuroscience author describes consumer mind for Turkish business

Engineering people’s expectations should be a priority for the Turkish advertising and marketing community in reaching consumers, a prominent psychologist said at a conference in Istanbul on Tuesday.

Widely praised for his books, “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” Jonah Lehrer told a forum convened by the Mediacat Communication Institute that consumer preferences could be massaged with the right kind of engineering. “Engineering expectations is of top importance, since one can also transform consumer preferences in this way,” he said.

The forum was held to present innovative strategies in the Turkish marketing and advertising community.
Lehrer told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review that there are two main parts of the brain involved in decision-making, the rational and the emotional. The way a consumer makes a decision is related to the neurons and expectations created by brands, he said.

In today’s world, academics and researchers have started to realize the rational and the emotional are not totally separable and emotions have some type of inner information in them. Medi-cognition, or so-called “thinking about thinking,” has started to gain more importance for the major brands of the world in order to construct expectations, he said.

“Brands signify pleasure. Even before we put a T-shirt on or taste a glass of a specific wine, the logo of the brands makes some neurons firing in our brains, which makes us like them,” he said. “More than the actual quality of the T-shirt or the uniqueness in the taste of the wine, the expectations created by the brands is the matter.”
Consumers might learn to counter the temptation of global brands in the future by developing self control methods, he said. Emphasizing the importance of “allocation of attention” in leading a successful life, Lehrer highlighted a famous experiment conducted in the 1970s by psychologist Walter Mischel involving a marshmallow.

In the study, a marshmallow was offered to a child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow he was promised two marshmallows instead of one. Lehrer argued that the length of time each child could resist the temptations of eating the marshmallow might have an impact on their future success, he said.

Those able to resist the temptation of the marshmallow have one major difference from the other children who rush to eat the marshmallow, “allocation of attention.” Those able to wait for their reward strategically allocated their attentions, Lehrer said, adding that people can be trained to be self-conscious consumers who resist the temptation of various products and in this case the marketing and advertising world would have to come up with new innovative methods of approach.

Lehrer told the Daily News that “thinking on thinking” and “decision-making processes” carry great importance in today’s world. “The best way of making the best decision is to use the right tool at the right time,” he said.

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