AMES, Iowa -- Just think of the business possibilities if researchers can analyze consumers' brain waves as they make purchasing decisions. Terry Childers, the Dean's Chair in marketing at Iowa State University's College of Business, hopes to make that happen through construction of a new lab in the Gerdin Business Building -- believed to be the first of its kind among business colleges nationally.
Childers conducts neuromarketing research, or the level of consciousness consumers have when making purchasing decisions. He is gathering funding for the lab through various grants and now seeking bids to have it constructed by the end of May and fully operational by the fall semester.
It will use an electrophysiological method that's similar to an Electroencephalogram (EEG) test.
"So we put a cap on a person's head and then connect those electrodes to the equipment, which capture the brain signals," Childers said. "We can then monitor what areas of the brain are firing to perform certain functions. And so it just gives another tool to provide insights on understanding how and why people make decisions."
Campus collaboration
Childers is consulting with ISU's facilities planning and management department and Rob West, an associate professor of psychology and director of Iowa State's cognitive psychology program, on the lab's design. West's cognitive psychology program has a similar lab, which requires a special room lined with copper to prevent any outside electrical interferences with the low-voltage signal provided through the cap. Designers plan to install a pre-fab "Faraday Cage" [shielded room] to reduce some of the cost.
West will assist in training lab technicians for the new business lab, which will encourage further interdisciplinary collaboration.
"Our intention is to have two facilities on campus where we can work together," Childers said. "These are time-intensive kinds of studies. It can take somewhere between two and three hours to actually run a study with an individual, so you can only do a few a day. And that's why we're planning to partner to utilize each other's facilities. I'll have certain capabilities that he doesn't have, and he has some that I won't have."
Through the new lab, Childers will continue his research on emotional intelligence -- the ability to understand and manage your emotions when making decisions -- as it relates to obesity. He was part of a research team at the University of Kentucky that conducted a three-year study on how emotions affect the types of foods we eat. It found that by training respondents on how to boost their ability to make an appropriate response to emotions concerning food, they're able to make better [healthier] choices.
"We study whether or not someone can reflect on their emotions, identify that they're present, and say, 'No, there are other ways and maybe I should go workout, rather than indulge in that big dessert that I'll regret later,'" Childers said.
In touch with marketing impact
He also plans to continue studying the role of haptic processing -- reacting to objects through touch -- within marketing. He is co-author of a study being presented this week at the Society for Consumer Psychology 2010 Winter Conference on how consumers process perceptual information obtained through haptic processing, and later recall it.
"It [haptic imagery] can both interfere with and facilitate your [buying] decision," Childers said. "If there is enough time in between the first exposure and the second, then it can facilitate [purchase]. If there's very little time -- it's almost a simultaneous kind of assessment -- then there's interference and it actually has a negative effect. That's because the perception system and the imagery system are both using the same area of the brain, and so they're fighting to get those resources in a simultaneous assessment."
Lead author Shannon B. Rinaldo, assistant professor of marketing in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, is presenting the paper Thursday in Florida.
The researchers conclude that when evaluating a texture-salient product, participants were more likely to recall texture imagery statements from the advertisement. So for products where the haptic properties are relevant to product quality or function -- such as bedding -- merchants may achieve better results by encouraging consumers to recall texture imagery from advertising.
Childers and Rinaldo are also conducting research on haptic processing in people who are visually impaired.
