A JOB Neuroscience

ISSN: 2150-7740 (Print) 2150-7759 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uabn20

Neuromarketing and AI—Powerful Together, but

Needing Scrutiny

Paul Root Wolpe

To cite this article: Paul Root Wolpe (2019) Neuromarketing and AI—Powerful Together, but
Needing Scrutiny, AJOB Neuroscience, 10:2, 69-70, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2019.1618414

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21507740.2019.1618414

Published online: 21 Jun 2019.

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AJOB Neuroscience, 10(2): 69–70, 2019
# 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 2150-7740 print / 2150-7759 online
DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2019.1618414
Editorial
Neuromarketing and AI—Powerful
Together, but Needing Scrutiny
Paul Root Wolpe, Emory University
“Neuromarketing” is a term generally referring to the
use of neurotechnologies—primarily brain imaging—to
directly access brain response to marketing stimuli. For
example, one famous study examined how a consumer’s
brain reflects their preference for Coke or Pepsi. The
assumption of neuromarketing is that directly observing
a brain response is in some degree truer, purer, and
more unsullied than watching behavior. Behavior can
defy preference. For example, I can buy Pepsi even
though I prefer Coke, and there are other kinds of miti-
gating factors that can subvert my preferences—for
example, they may not have Coke, Coke may be more
expensive, and so on. The hope is that neuromarketing
can ferret out someone’s “true” preferences, and allow
marketers to understand, at a “deeper” level, what
consumers truly prefer.
The challenge of neuromarketing has always been to
its exclusivity. Is there anything that one really learns
from brain imaging that one cannot learn from behav-
ioral or attitudinal studies? And if brain imaging shows
I “really” prefer Coke, but I always buy Pepsi, am I
somehow wrong, or is there something wrong with the
neuromarketing study? And which is more valuable to
the marketer—“my brain’s” preference or my behavior?
Over time, the field of neuromarketing has
expanded. Studies of brain activity have merged with
more psychological or behavioral studies under the
rubric of “neuromarketing.” Today, the term encom-
passes things like eye-tracking studies, color and packag-
ing preference research, examinations of how consumers
make choices (and the deterrent effect of having too
many choices), and other studies and approaches mixed
together into a broader category of neuromarketing. No
longer is a sophisticated neurotechnology necessary;
now, neuromarketing refers to any activity that imputes
a reaction of the brain to marketing variables.
In other words, neuroscience, psychology, computer
science, and other related fields have joined together to
paint a more sophisticated portrait of consumer behavior
and give marketers new tools for selling things to us.
Address correspondence to Paul Root Wolpe, Center for Ethics, Emory University, 1531 Dickey Drive, 1st Floor, Atlanta, GA 30322,
USA. E-mail: pwolpe@emory.edu
Into that new, enriched field comes another tool, arti-
ficial intelligence, and its ability to sort through millions
and billions of data bits looking for patterns and com-
monalities. Digital consumers—that is, most of us in this
digital age—leave personal information in our wake like
so much detritus. Social media postings, online purchas-
ing, memberships and subscriptions, online forms,
services we sign up for, payment options, surveys, evites
and ecards—we spew out personal information for
which the traces are permanently encoded in the cloud,
where artificial intelligence (AI) programs can retrieve
and reconstruct them. There are services now that will
scan the Web and report back our publicly available per-
sonal information, and journalists and bloggers who take
advantage of these programs uniformly report shock at
the depth and breadth of the information available.
Privacy is increasingly becoming an illusion, at least for
those of us who have sacrificed it to the ease of digital
accessibility.
Into that landscape comes services like Sorter, co-
founded by Will Allred, who is interviewed in this issue
of AJOB Neuroscience. Will is chief operating officer
(COO) of the company characterizing itself as “The Next
Generation of Human Experience Intelligence” (www.
sorter.com). The conceit of Sorter is that it has surveyed
all the science and transformed neuromarketing from its
origins in imaging studies into the power of comprehen-
sive digital information surveillance. The company
claims that what marketers really want, or should want,
is to understand the individual personality types of con-
sumers, and to target their marketing to those types.
Consumers respond differently to different marketing
strategies, depending on a small set of personality pro-
files that they fit into. Sorter can help determine which
personality types any set of consumers falls into, or is
likely to fall into, so that businesses can create targeted,
or multiple, advertising campaigns and have the right
kind of appeal sent to the right kind of consumer.
Mr. Allred’s stated goal is to improve the marketing
experience for both the advertiser and the consumer. The
ajob Neuroscience 69
AJOB Neuroscience
consumer will find certain kinds of advertising more
pleasant to encounter, so targeting that kind of advertis-
ing to that consumer enhances the shopping experience,
or is less off-putting when encountered casually, than
the kinds of ads that people complain populate their
Facebook feed. As he states, “When people make pur-
chases based on personality tailored experiences, they
end up being happier.”
Of course, they are not the only ones who are hap-
pier. The ultimate goal of advertising is to sell product.
And a happy consumer, more attracted to particular
kinds of ads, is, one assumes, more likely to buy the
product. So the marketer is happier as well. The key is
matching the right product to the right person.
On the one hand, if I am in the market to buy a new
coffee maker, and not only are the ads I encounter on
my social media fun for me to peruse, but they also—
having gleaned from other data about me that I am a
coffee snob—show me nice espresso makers rather than
a knock-off Mr. Coffee, we all seem to win. I have a
more pleasant shopping experience, I waste less time
sorting through products I don’t want, and the appropri-
ate vendor gets my order.
However, the ethical substrate has troubling ele-
ments. In most cases, consumers don’t realize the priv-
acy rights that they may be giving away when they
70 ajob Neuroscience
check that “I agree” link—who actually reads those con-
tracts? And even if I know that my information is strewn
through the publicly accessible digital landscape, I can
still feel a sense of violation when some stranger tries to
accumulate it without my consent to build a personality
profile of me in order to sell me things. Clearly, there
needs to be a higher level set of ethical principles to
regulate such behavior than individual acknowledgment
of lengthy online terms of use.
Still, the place where Allred and Sorter can make a
real difference is in their intention to have the consumer
control their profiles. If I can be the portal to information
inflow—if I can control who sends me what and what
kinds of vendors have access to my online feeds—then
we flip the marketing calculus and make consumers the
ultimate gatekeepers to what marketing reaches them.
No matter how we define neuromarketing these days
and how much of it is not really “neuro” at all, it still is
an important and growing field that demands attention
from neuroethicists. We live in a capitalistic world where
marketers are employing a potentially powerful new tool
to sell us things. Consultants like Will Allred and Sorter
have approached ethicists, asking for help to shape this
field in the most ethical way possible. It is a worthy
activity to help them do so. 䊏
April–June, Volume 10, Number 2, 2019