Advertising Article Summary "The Brain: Marketing to Your Mind"

In Alice Park's essay, "The Brain: Marketing to your mind," she describes new research into the brain's decision making mechanisms, and the likelihood of its impending use in advertising. She describes the ways in which scientists determine the decision making pathways, through tests done in fMRI scanners or with EEG's, and the implications of these results for advertisers. Park reveals that simply through brands, the brain creates shortcuts in the decision making process, causing test participants to "prefer" a beverage a certain beverage simply because of a predetermined decision shortcut, such as a preference for Coke, over a blind-taste-test preference for Pepsi. She describes further research in which "anticipatory emotions...even before the cognitive areas of the brain are brought in to assess options [are] more intuitive and emotional regions [and] are already priming the decision-making process and can foreshadow the outcome," (110). These emotional pre-decisions are important to our survival, and help inform the decision making process.