The Brain Sell Interview Neuromarketing Growing Pains and Future Gains. Erwin Hartsuiker CEO of Mindmedia

Transcription

1 The Brain Sell Interview Neuromarketing Growing Pains and Future Gains. Erwin Hartsuiker CEO of Mindmedia

2 Neuromarketing Growing Pains and Future Gains The Brain Sell interviews Erwin Hartsuiker CEO of Mindmedia The Brain Sell interviewed Mindmedia s CEO, Erwin Hartsuiker, in the company s elegantly modern headquarters at Roermond Herten, an ancient Dutch town on the River Meuse, some two hours by rail from Amsterdam. When he founded Mindmedia, in 1992, Erwin s main business was designing and building neuro- and biofeedback technology that helps to promote health and performance. Today, the company also supplies equipment to companies around the world, who are doing neuromarketing. We began the interview by asking Erwin what had led him to set up his company in the first place. Erwin Hartsuiker (EH): Since the mid- eighties I had built up experience in the field of neurophysiology, EEG, evoked potentials and brain mapping. But I wasn t so much interested in the medical applications which I would describe as being disease- based. The medical industry, including the pharmaceutical industry, is very much focused on non- functioning, malfunctioning and disease. I saw an opportunity then, which is still perfectly valid today, to use medical technology and software to measure and improve health, stress, performance and cognitive processes, rather than to diagnose or treat disease. The Brain Sell (TBS): What was your own professional background in these areas? EH: My professional background was in the field of software development for neuro- physiology and EEG. I ve worked in various Dutch companies who were pioneering in that time, because brain mapping in 1986 was very new. So that s where I got my education and my training and if you would describe my professional background with one word at that time, it would be software development for neurophysiology. TBS: Now you have moved into neuromarketing and sell equipment all over the world. EH: Yes, we have re- sellers in over 50 countries who are representing our vision and our technology very successfully and a number of them are involved in neuromarketing. In both South America and in Mexico we have two different re- sellers, each with a company active in neuromarketing. Furthermore we have interests from China, Holland, Germany and Japan.

3 Over the years we found out that people wanted to use our equipment for measuring and observing human behaviour and the human response, not only in the field of health, performance or sports, but also in marketing and neuromarketing. TBS: What do you think of neuromarketing s current place within neuroscience? EH: Well, I think that academic neuroscientists sometimes have a problem with neuromarketing because they think: Oh my God it s something commercial and marketing or commercial activities should not be part of science! They are coming from the point of view of observing and measuring and quantifying human behaviour and they do see that this work has consequences for marketing as well. But they are sort of afraid of it because it s where commerce and science mix and some people still feel quite uneasy about that. I think, though, that attitudes are changing. Universities too see that cooperation with companies is actually good or even necessary. It s not a danger, it s an opportunity. TBS: A lot of the neuroscientists we have spoken say the amount of hype in some sections of the industry puts them off. Clients too have complained to us about the smoke and mirrors of neuromarketing. EH: Well, I agree with that because and this is also why some scientists are conservative regarding neuromarketing they have observed that the mixture of commerce and science can work against science. Science wants to observe as objectively as possible what a certain phenomenon is and how it can be quantified and explained. Some companies have, let us say, not managed the expectations regarding neuromarketing very well and they have hyped it. I also get the impression that some companies were exaggerating the results they were getting with neuromarketing. They were predicting a future in which neuromarketing would deliver spectacular results very quickly and be better than any other method previously known! I don t see it like that. I think it s just another tool which should be carefully analysed, carefully used and be approached from a scientific point of view. Then whatever companies or marketers will do with that knowledge that s up to them.

4 TBS: One could argue I suppose that all the hype has in fact generated a lot of interest and resulted in money being put into the business whereas, maybe if it had proceeded in a very conservative and scientifically respectable way it might never have created the levels of commercial interest it has. It s a very new industry and maybe that level of hype is an inevitable part of being part of a new industry. EH: I think it s a typical process which also occurred in other fields where expectations were exaggerated, where there was a hype. A lot of money was invested in quickly developing products and then later on the expectations had to be dampened a bit. And then over time it found its own right place in the field of either science or in clinical applications or marketing. So I think this how the modern world sometimes works and I do think that it s wise that scientists are conservative about this. In the clinical field there is a principle that when you make medical claims, you always have to be very careful about what you claim and there should always be enough evidence to back it up. Evidence means data that can be checked by others, it cannot be a black box where somebody claims: I get wonderful results but I m not going to share the data with you! I think a similar principle actually should apply to Neuromarketing. TBS: A lot of the companies are claiming to protect their intellectual property, they operate a black box system where they won t reveal their methodology. You can understand this from a commercial standpoint. Why should they reveal their algorithms for competitors to copy? EH: Yeah. It s a paradox. I completely understand the point of view of the intellectual property rights and protecting the black box. But then if you do that, that should be made clear and companies that do this should not pretend that what they re doing is verifiable by others, so in that way it cannot be presented as scientific data. As long as companies are clear and transparent about that then that s just a reality we have to deal with.

5 TBS: That s a very good point. What did you think of the ARF (1) study a couple of years back? Our lab participated in that but the results were hardly a glowing endorsement of neuro- marketing effectiveness. EH: I think it only showed that it s a field that is in development. I think the companies that joined took a risk. The risk was that something which is under development, like neuromarketing, was likely to produce different results in products from different companies. That was the risk. Several products were being compared and one system would have this outcome and another system would have another outcome. The initiative of the ARF I think was good, but maybe it was too early. TBS: Could we now turn to the advances which you ve seen over the years in terms of the hardware and the software. As a software developer when you started, do you consider it is keeping pace with the advances in the hardware? EH: Yes well we always describe our technology as consisting of three parts. First there is the sensor part which acquires the physiological signal from the body, which can be brain activity, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity and so on. That technology is still advancing of course, it s being made smaller and smarter. Secondly there is the hardware that acquires and digitises the information, like our Nexus systems, which send real- time data to the computer, are wireless, portable, and have flash memory for 24 hour recording. That technology development will go on. I think things will continue to become smaller, more wireless and more portable. Last and not least there is the software component. From the software development perspective I would say there s still an almost infinite amount of possibilities in analysis of the physiological signals. There will also be advances in the real- time representation of data which is something that we specialise in. In some cases in neuromarketing it would be interesting to have feedback about someone s behaviour or response really quickly. (1) Advertising Research Foundation commissioned this study in 2011.

6 Mind Media is interested in not only in the post- session analysis which may take hours of days, but we are also interested in real- time information where you can observe people on the spot with portable equipment. Instead of measuring things in a laboratory, the challenge is to get real- time feedback about people s response in the place where they work, shop and so on. There s still much work to do there. TBS: What do you think one can, with some degree of confidence, actually predict from EEG data. Where do you think the commercial strengths lie in EEG? EH: Although I started with EEG, we have incorporated all the other physiological signals into our NeXus systems, because we found there is a great depth of information, not only in the brain but also in all the other physiology. The mistake people sometimes make with the brain signals is that they think that they contain all the information. And that s simply not true. First of all people should remember that we re recording mostly on the surface. We re recording the cortex and these signals also contain what we may call noise or random signals that have little to do with cognitive processes. Having said that, every year we do see progress made. We do see that because of the information that we learn from fmri (2) that EEG does contain information which correlates with cognitive functions. Measuring emotion with is another matter though. TBS: Indeed. EH: Emotion I find much, much, harder to derive from the EEG and that s why we have this multi- modal or multi- physiology approach. From the EEG alone I would find it hard to say much about the emotional response of the person. If we combine and that s one of the things we do the EEG with measurements of the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, movement, muscle, gesture and facial recognition, measuring emotion becomes more feasible. When you integrate all of this then that s where the opportunity is. I think that if people believe that the EEG contains all of the information because it s the central nervous system, they will be disappointed. (2) fmri: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a form of brain imaging that measures changes in blood flow to different regions of the brain.

7 TBS: One final question. One of the problems I think a lot of people have with EEG, and even more so perhaps with the fmri is the number of subjects you can actually run in terms of budget and time. You know N equals perhaps 40 and sometimes, even, N= 6 or 7. And that s clearly a limitation, that s the statistical limitation on the reliability. Do you foresee a way in the next few years where much larger groups of people can be measured maybe at the same time? EH: Yes, I do. TBS: Take the neuromarketing company EmSense which went out of business not long ago. A lot of clients like the EmSense model because it seems so simple. Just stick on a couple of sensors and you can gather all the date you need from almost any number of subjects. It made it all look so easy so simple. When we know, in fact, that it is not. EH: That s where the danger lies. If you simplify things too much and you reduce the number of EEG channels to let s say one for the sake of ease of use. One EEG channel is fine if you re doing feedback training for attention and sports and some other applications. But making statements about the state of the brain, the emotional response or cognitive response based on one EEG channel, I don t think is wise. fmri studies have the advantage or providing good spatial resolution and enable us to look deeper into the brain. With EEG that s still very limited, even with LORETA (3) technology, it s simply not as good as fmri. Obviously fmri is big and bulky and expensive, you cannot bring a system into a supermarket and then monitor people with it so it s a little bit artificial but still very interesting. The advantage of EEG is of course it s high temporal resolution. We see things happening within milliseconds, whereas fmri gives you an average picture over many seconds and then also what they display is an average picture over many measurements. (3) LORETA - Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography a method for localising the electrical activity in the brain based on multichannel surface EEG recordings.

8 So both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. With a small multi- physiology EEG system like the Nexus, you can measure a group of people. I can imagine number of people each carrying a system on their body, being measured at the same time in say a super- market or mall. So you will get larger numbers of populations more quickly and for less money than with fmri. TBS: Where do you think the industry will be in, let s say, five years time on the basis of what you ve just said? EH: I think the industry will move towards more portability, towards measuring people s responses in near real- time and in real- world locations instead of in a laboratory. I think that the multi- modal approach of measuring a wide range of physiological signals extended with facial expression, eye tracking and so on, will also continue to grow. More evidence and insights about how and why humans respond to various types and forms of information will come from Neuroscience. I think Neuromarketing will in fact profit from new insights gathered in all the social and life- sciences. Thereby new and better ways to present information or marketing- stimuli will be found. In the end though, what fascinates me is a better understanding of human behaviour. End