Study Spotlights Marketing's Impact on the Brain

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, January 14, 2008; 6:00 PM

Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, Jan. 14 (HealthDay News) -- It's a little secret that many marketers would rather keep secret: People often think that if something costs more, it's got to be worth it.

But that's not always true, suggests a new study that used high-tech brain imaging to illustrate its point.

Researchers from Stanford University and California Institute of Technology found that inflating the price of a product -- in this case red wine -- led to increased activity in a region of the brain that "encodes" subjective pleasantness. The study results offer insights into the "neural" effects of marketing, suggesting that the perceived price of a product affects a person's enjoyment of that product, the scientists said.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found the specific area of the brain -- the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- where that perception of enjoyment lies. This ability to manipulate basic biology to increase perceived pleasure is an example of what is called "neuromarketing," the researchers said.

"We find the more expensive the wine, the more activity we find in the medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain," said Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Cal Tech.

"I can change the activity in the part of the brain that encodes for subjective pleasantness by changing the price at which you think the product is sold, without changing the product," he added.

The findings are published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, Rangel and his colleagues had 20 people rank their enjoyment of differently priced red wines while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. But there was a catch: Two of the wines were presented twice, once with a high price tag and once with a low price tag.

The researchers found that people said they liked the "expensive" wine more than the "cheaper" one. And the fMRI scans showed that when people drank the "expensive" wine, they had more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which reacts to experienced pleasantness for odors, taste and music.