[Sigia-l] Branding works?

[Listera]

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a
scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and,
while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the
Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi
tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral
putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for
instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for
completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral
putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans
when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to
gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by repeating the
experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the
sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects
said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects
was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex,
an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive
powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way
on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink
-- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed
the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the
subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had
demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special
power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.

<http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/000553.html#000553>

Well, of course, what Montague didn't quite understand was that the "market"
for Coke was already embedded in homo sapiens' psyche millions of years ago
and sufficiently differentiated from the Pepsi market; he just "discovered"
it. :-)

---- 
Ziya

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