Research Areas

The Neuroimaging research group works on the field of neuromarketing  as well as neuroeconomics.

The research in neuroeconomics is headed by Prof. Christian E. Elger and Prof. Armin Falk. Prof. Christian E. Elger is Medical Director and head of the Department of Epileptology at the University of Bonn Medical Center. Prof. Armin Falk is Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, Program Director at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and Director of the Bonn Laboratory Experimental Economics the University of Bonn.

    
1. Neuromarketing

What is neuromarketing?

Nowadays the market is overcrowded with special offers for goods. For this reason it is unavoidable for companies to market their product as added value and to position it strategically. In this area the market research has developed a huge amount of concepts.

To anchor a couple of brands in the awareness set and trigger its concupiscence it is essential to understand both the thinking and the acting of the costumer. Why does one buy a certain product? How does the costumer decide between two brands? Which brand targets the interest of the customer in times of an overload of information? And why does it target her/his interest?

Only if the costumer is understood in its acting and thinking, it is possible to offer a product which evokes her/his interest and stand out amidst the flood of products of the concurrency. Market research has taken great advantage of psychological theories and methods.

In the meantime a lot has been understood about consumption behaviour, but as yet we do not know what is happening in the brain of the consumer. With every product, service and advertisement an interaction is created between the consumer and the subject.

The brain is responsible for 100% of this interaction.

In this respect neuroscience can bring a great contribution. Brain research has developed rapidly in the past years. Of course not every secret of the human brain has been unveiled yet but there is a lot of progress made in understanding its function.

Neuroscientists deal with question of information intake, memory storage and information recall. Answers to these questions in marketing would open the possibility to design products and advertisement in such a way that the brand would remain in the memory and is accommodated in the awareness and as a consequence of that in the choice set of the customer.

Neuromarketing is an interdisciplinary cooperation between neuroscientists, psychologists and marketscientists with the aim to fathom the behaviour of the customer. The central questions here are: “Is there a physiological correlate of consumer-behaviour?”

“Is it possible to make assumptions on how to create advertisement and products based on typical brain reactions?”

A past study provides the insight, that memory associated brain areas in the temporal lobe (like the hippocampus) are activated more strongly with faces than with logos. This allows the conclusion that faces are more potent triggers than logos for emotions and memory related brain processes.

Hereby neuromarketing combines marketing know-how with the latest insights in brain research which opens a fascinating perspective on consumer behaviour.

The reality of this topic evokes sceptical viewpoints as well. Do we have a transparent brain now whereby we can switch on a bottom for buying? Of course not! We can explain why pictures are easier to store in the human brain and are easier to recall than words. But it will take decades to understand the human brain in its whole complexity. The`buy button` may never be found if it even exists.

The method

Neuromarketing is a research direction which combines psychological market research with neuroscientific methods. Our research group’s priority lies in functional magnetic resonance imaging. With the help of fMRI the working processes of the brain can be imaged. The activities of the brain are recorded while the subject is in the magnetic resonance scanner and watches advertising or makes buying decisions. After a highly complex statistical analysis we can see the activated areas of the brain during these tasks. Nowadays, since the function of many brain areas is known (like for instance the reward-centre), we can interpret the reaction of the consumer brain with much more acuity than it was possible before.   

Of course this is a highly complex task, however now is the time when investors must be found who are interested in helping to meet this challenge.

2. Neuroeconomics

What is neuroeconomics?

Economists believed in the homo oeconomicus for a long time. According to this view, the human being bases its decision solely on a rational individual cost-performance analysis. This assumption has been challenged clearly in recent studies. The human being is not solely rational. Pivotal information like the price of a product or its name is often sufficient for the customer to base his decision on. Although he does not realise that he is basing his decision on these factors. In addition, altruistic and cooperative behaviour are much more often used in human interaction than would expect in a solely homo oeconomicus.

Daniel Kahnemann und Amos Tversky discovered in the end of the seventies that the human being regrets a loss more than he is pleased with a profit of the same amount. A lot of factors are known to influence this perception: e.g.  the way in which you present the alternatives to (framing effect), decisions are made on easily accessible information (availability bias) furthermore people stick on opinions more if they have made a strong effort  to reach them (sunk-cost-effect).

In combining economic theories with psychological and neuroscientific knowledge it is possible to investigate the above mentioned phenomena in more detail. Using fMRI we are able to analyze physiological processes in the brain of a subject, while it is judging alternatives, taking high risk decisions or feeling  loss aversion. This way we can try to solve the question whether the observed behaviour shows physiological correlates and the underlying causes of the behaviour. Eventually every decision is an output of the human brain.

Game theory

Gamet heory deals with decision making situations as well. Namely with those in which the result is not only dependent on one decision but also on the behaviour of other people.

This opens a broad field for applications of fMRI. Especially the simultaneous use of two magnet resonance scanners offers the unique possibility to investigate negotiation situations.