How to get inside your customer's head.

It's marketing, not brain surgery… yet.

Marketers are constantly looking for a surefire way to connect with consumers, and this time, they may have found it… inside the human brain.

Using basic neuroscience techniques, marketers have begun using biometric testing to measure brain waves, skin response, eye movements, pulse rates and other physical reactions that show how emotionally engaged an audience is with an ad. So now, instead of relying on verbal responses from a focus group (a marketing research standard for the past few decades), marketers can gauge the effectiveness of messages based on unequivocal physical responses.

Biometric testing was a very hot topic at the Advertising Research Foundation's annual conference in April 2008. Attendees were extremely interested in popular business books like Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer's Brain by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin, and the seductive pitch from "neuroresearch" suppliers like Nielson's NeuroFocus or EmSense Corp.

Why is this important? Because, as a marketer, you need to realize that this type of science and innovation could drastically change the way you do your job. And you can expect more breakthroughs like this to keep coming quickly… so you need to be prepared.

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