Exploring Neurobiology's Impact on Consumer Behavior with Hilke Plassmann (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hilke Plassmann, INSEAD Chaired Professor of Decision Neuroscience and Associate Professor of Marketing, is here with us to discuss the latest developments at the vanguard of her field. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: So you are studying how our neurobiology, in a sense, predetermines our response to brands and marketing cues. What's an example of that?

Speaker 2: One of my favorite studies is where I give people identical wines, but they don't know this, and I tell them, look, this is an expensive wine, this is a cheap wine. And then I ask them about which wine do you enjoy more after they've consumed it. I had people in a brain imaging scanner, so I could see kind of what's happening in their brain while they're actually consuming the wines and while they're making this judgment. And what I found was that brain regions that are sensitive to kind of taste pleasantness encoding, they're affected by the price tag. So in other words, you don't only think you like the wine more when it's more expensive, you feel you like the wine more when it's more expensive because the brain region that is involved in that is telling you.

Speaker 1: So marketing cues such as a price tag, would you say they affect us mainly on an unconscious

Speaker 2: level? When we think about consciousness, there's a lot, I think, of confusion. So we think that there's something either conscious or unconscious, and this is from a neuroscientific standpoint a bit much more nuanced, actually. So for example, I could be very well aware of the fact that I want to eat healthy, and then I see this indulgent piece of chocolate. If I don't pay attention to my goal, although I'm technically, I know that I have this goal of eating healthy, I still might have self-control failure and eat the chocolate because I'm just not paying attention to it. So what I'm saying is that in some ways from a neuroscience perspective, this continuum is characterized by a connectivity between different brain systems. So there is just a perceptual system that allows me to perceive, for example, whether I visually see a stimulus. Then there is associated brain regions that help me to guide my attention to this, and then there are more higher cognitive regions. And if all of these are involved, then I'm more on the conscious side. If only the perceptual system is involved, then I'm more on the pre-conscious or, well, unconscious side. But it's really a spectrum. It's not an either-or.

Speaker 1: Where is the most exciting work in your field or the most intriguing work being done at the moment?

Speaker 2: We like to think of sociodemographics as differences, but we know from a lot of research that that might not be the best way to segment your market. There could be a lot of other interesting biological individual differences. So our last piece was on looking at the size of gray matter in different brain regions. Then we also can think about how do different brain regions actually connect to each other? So how good is the strength of connectivity between different brain systems? We can think about what is actually happening in your brain at rest. So connectivity between different brain systems at rest when you think of nothing at all. So this also has been found to predict a lot of consumer-relevant behaviors.

Speaker 1: So when you're talking about this being applied in a marketing context so that marketers can better understand consumer behavior, obviously they're never going to have the kind of expertise in this area that you do. So what can they do about this?

Speaker 2: It's important for marketers to understand these trends. And I also think what is important is that they, in some ways, collaborate with researchers more. For example, I'm working with a company that has those market-level data, which I as a researcher don't have. But then we're looking at how much can actually neurobiological data help or improve these predictions as compared to also method that they usually use and data that they usually have available. So I think what makes a lot of sense is to form partnerships and collaborations to find a structure to the big data from different sources and leverage is the best way to explain, for example, commercial success or success of new products, these kind of things.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: You're welcome.