"Almost every focus group throws up someone more vocal and bossy, who either inspires others to follow or react against [them] or both," complained a senior fellow at the London Business School. Thus marketers aren't necessarily getting truthful answers from participants and cannot get to what potential buyers really think as opposed to what they say when a moderator asks them.

Other marketers also have a beef with survey research tools—questionnaires and one-on-one interviews—alleging that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get accurate marketing data. People give what they believe to be the socially-acceptable answer, critics complain. They say they watch PBS, listen to NPR, and read The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, for instance, when they really watch Brady Bunch reruns on Nickelodeon, listen to pop radio, and read People. They say that it's not important that the car they drive impress their neighbors or that a product carry a low price tag, when these can be highly motivating to a purchase decision. The advantage to an MRI or brain scan machine, neuromarketing proponents say, is that it doesn't lie—it objectively measures a person's reaction by monitoring brain response. By tapping into the unconscious mind, you get at what's really driving purchase decisions or which ad is the most appealing with no concern about the honesty of a research participant's answers.

This all sounds very cutting-edge and innovative, and if the focus group is the standard of comparison, it sure is. But in terms of improving the health of marketing programs, we say neuromarketing is an unlikely contributor. It is to twenty-first century marketing what blood letting and electric shock therapy were to nineteenth century medicine. It sounds really cool with scientific underpinnings, but it has many of the same drawbacks as focus groups. And in this respect, its problems are similar to psycho-physiological alternatives to self-report data, such as pupil dilation and galvanic skin response methodologies which were hot on the 1960s.

First of all, if we're talking MRI brain scans, at a certain point we have to believe it becomes cost prohibitive to recruit more research participants. And you can't project the data gathered from the brains of 12-50 individuals onto a larger population—it's not representative by any means. While it might be more reliable than a focus group when it comes to telling you that something is stimulating or appealing, brain scans can't tell you what exactly was stimulating, nor can it tell you why something wasn't (so you could fix it). "This is a descriptive technique—it describes what the brain is doing," explained Gemma Calvert, the cofounder of neuromarketing firm Neurosense. Meanwhile, ZMET can theoretically get you to what buyers think about your brand, but what if you want to change what they think? Just as with focus groups, neither offers prescriptive information. Same as focus groups, brain scans don't improve the predictive certitude that a buyer will purchase a new brand, product, or service. The ZMET method appears to draw conclusions from a thorough review by a ZMET practitioner of transcripts of interviews and collages of magazine cut-outs pasted together by research subjects. As a result, the interpretation of results might differ depending on who's doing the interpreting—as in a focus group or Rorschach test, one person can draw one conclusion while someone else comes to a different one after seeing the same output.

Focus groups aside, the knocks against quantitative research methods aren't new. We've said for years you don't find out what's important to buyers by asking them—we'd agree you get socially-acceptable answers—and that people exaggerate the probability they will buy a new product or service. But there are clever, reliable, and proven quantitative research techniques that enable you to get at what's truly motivating; what people read, watch, and listen to; and for evaluating the true likelihood of purchase of a new product or service. In our three decades of experience, we have found that people are no more likely to lie or exaggerate today than they were 10 years ago and, as a result, any good consulting firm has the means to control for respondent prevarication (a.k.a., response error).

What's more, we fail to see that brain scans and ZMET have any application to most key areas of strategy development. They offer little in the way of key insights into the profitability of different sets of buyers in a market or what media channels they use. Developing a compelling positioning strategy requires understanding buyer motivations, but also what the perceptions of the brand are relative to competitors and consideration of the feasibility of different options—to our knowledge brain scans and ZMET don't offer this kind of supplemental analysis. Advertising creative strategy should be based on the positioning, not generated on its own based on what pictures a ZMET research participant cut out of a magazine. You can't consider hundreds of thousands of different product configurations to identify the most profitable—brain scans and ZMET don't appear to take profitability into account.

Brain scans are interesting. ZMET certainly taps into creative thinking and attention to understanding the perceptions of your brand in your customers mind (instead of your own). And we can't help but delight in the fact that neuroscience and out-of-the-box thinkers like Zaltman are leading the charge away from focus groups. But we have to caution that the trappings of science—electrodes, MRIs, probing the unconscious, measuring pupil dilation and contraction, and the electro-sensitivity of the skin—doesn't make a marketing research method more scientific or actionable. While perhaps better than the average focus group, neuromarketing doesn't represent a giant leap forward for marketing research.

Gay marriage reemerged as the hot social topic du jour last May when Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to allow same sex marriages. As gay and lesbian couples lined up outside Massachusetts' courthouses, opponents mobilized their troops across the country to fight what they view as a terrible threat to the family and morality in America. Coast to coast, a flurry of ballot initiatives and legislative activity to amend state constitutions ensued and President Bush voiced his strong support for an amendment to the U.S. constitution to ban gay marriage citing, "an overwhelming consensus in our country for protecting the institution of marriage." But we wondered just how "overwhelming" the consensus was when it came to federal action on this controversial issue.

Copernicus analyzed the results of a Greenfield Online poll of more than 1000 Americans which asked, "Do you support a federal amendment to ban gay marriage?" In general we found Americans are against federal action of this nature: 42% of Americans say they support a federal amendment, while a majority 58% say no. We further explored differences among demographic groups including gender, age, marital status, and regional location.

Interestingly, we discovered women and men differ significantly on this issue. Sixty-three percent of women indicated they do not support a federal ban, while men are more equally divided (48% say "yes" vs. 52% say "no"). Younger Americans, those ages 18-34, overwhelmingly oppose a federal amendment: 71% of under-34-year-olds say they do not support one. Meanwhile, adults over the age of 35 split down the middle. Likewise, married Americans break evenly on the issue with 51% in favor, 49% against, while 68% of unmarried Americans stand against a federal ban.

Copernicus also found significant regional differences across the U.S. Americans in the West are most opposed to a federal ban (67%), followed by those in the Northeast (58%), followed by the Midwest (54%), and finally the South (53%). Think of these regional differences as a rank order of "liberal thinking" across the country.

Here is a complete results table:

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We've often heard the line from marketing and brand managers and their advertising agencies after a highly creative, image-laden, somewhat quirky or mysterious (e.g., the Aflack duck) execution scores poorly in a copy test that it's not a sign that the execution failed to resonate with the intended audience. In fact, the disappointing result is not surprising. After all, they say, the execution is an example of one that builds over time. In other words, the more an audience is exposed to it, the more impactful it will be. Sometimes companies launch entire campaigns truly believing immediate audience reactions are not reflective of potential long-term performance.

While a common conventional wisdom, the evidence overwhelming contradicts the notion that a poor scoring execution will become a strong performer over time. In fact, in our experience, while the absolute copy testing score for their execution might increase with each exposure, it remains low relative to the average execution. In other words, if an execution scores below an average execution after the first exposure, it scores below the average execution even after the fifth exposure.

Millward Brown, one of the world's top 10 market research organizations and most respected copy testing firms, has found that a target audience locks into a creative element the first time they are exposed to a commercial. Millward Brown calls this element the "creative magnifier" and no matter how many times a target sees the commercial, the creative magnifier doesn't change. "People don't study commercials as if they were in school," explained Millward Brown's Frank Chipman, "If they don't get it the first time, they don't get it period. This doesn't change no matter the number of exposures. They don't see the same commercial differently with each exposure. They don't learn something new each time they watch it." As further evidence of the lock of the creative magnifier, Chipman points to advertising tracking data they have from a variety of clients who've run the same commercials over the course of a year. The messages respondents report seeing do not change.

When it comes to advertising executions, there isn't such as thing as an "aha moment" when suddenly it becomes crystal clear to a target what you were trying to communicate. If your audience scratches its collective head and says, "what was that about?" the first time they see a commercial, they will do the same thing every time they see that commercial.

For more insightful marketing discoveries, visit http://www.copernicusmarketing.com/discover/index.htm

Have a hot discovery for our next release? Contact us at ami.bowen@copernicusmarketing.com

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Some people have put the Enron fiasco behind them, but we're still deeply disturbed by it. So you can imagine how excited we were to get our hands on a copy of Conspiracy of Fools, a gripping account of the corporate shenanigans, personalities, and general buffoonery that went on at Enron leading up to the company's infamous collapse. Even after all the media coverage and in-depth stories that described what happened at the company and what different people did and when, we're still stunned by Eichenwald's account of how senior management justified and went about cooking the plumping up the firm's financials.

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The 2005 AMA Strategic Marketing Conference, Six Sigma Marketing: Turning the Dream of Marketing Perfection into Reality, will feature the best ideas in the practice today. Leading authors, consultants, and practitioners including customer lifetime value measurement and experimental design expert Paul Berger; Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia, authors of The Rule of Three: Surviving and Thriving in Competitive Markets; Michael Silverstein, author of Berry-AMA Book Prize winner Trading Up; Ed Keller, author of The Influentials; James Lenskold, author of Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer, and Corporate Profitability; Roland Rust, inventor of the Customer Equity Framework; and Copernicus' own Kevin Clancy.

The AMA conference will take place on May 9-11, 2005, at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Chicago. Register early to reserve your spot at the conference today. Don't delay, the 2004 conference sold out quickly! For more information, visit: http://ecommerce.ama.org/strategic.htm

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