Thursday, March 03, 2005

Searching for the Why of the Buy

Thanks to Saint Nate for passing along this great article, "Searching for the Why of the Buy"

I actually had the opportunity to read the Baylor Pepsi Challenge paper (mentioned at the end of the article) for a journal club in the fall, and the conclusions were questionable to say the least. There were so many problems with the methodology that the results that they claimed about brand recognition could never be applied to a larger population. The sad thing is, that done properly, the study could have been a really novel way of looking at reward circuits in the brain, rather than assessing marketing techniques, which is something that the authors may not have understood to begin with.

I haven't read the other papers mentioned in the LA Times article, but I can only imagine that most of them are riddled with methodological problems as well. Not to say that all the other neuroimaging papers out there are perfect, but you have to wonder why people and corporations would invest money in expensive marketing research that doesn't really tell you anything about how effective a particular brand's marketing really is.

posted by Mudfud @ 12:42 PM