Is Neuromarketing Ethical?
By Hazel Henderson
Marketing helped drive the USA’s post World War II boom. The arts of advertising and public relations flowered on Madison Avenue and in hundreds of business schools in the USA and gradually spread to Europe and other industrial societies. From meeting needs expressed by consumers, marketing began to drive hyper-consumerism by inventing and creating new wants. Legions of brilliant, creative minds were recruited into driving this mass-consumption form of industrial expansion.
Marketing has always entailed manipulating consumers’ tastes by appealing to emotions and often irrational urges and impulse buying. Marketing and advertising dollars drive entertainment, TV, radio and internet content and mediate what news the public gets. Marketing’s psychological incursions into human minds were informed by such early “gurus” as Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays’ famous PR campaign for his client, the American Tobacco Company, entailed paying ten debutantes to walk down 5th Avenue in New York City smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, “torches of freedom,” as alerted media took pictures. The brand took off.
By the 1960s, marketers tried to introduce a new form of mind manipulation: subliminal advertising. This entailed embedding pictures of a product within a regular movie, but flashed frequently and invisible to the viewer’s normal perception. Experiments proved that subliminal messages for a soft drink worked, so that movie viewers bought more of the product. A public outcry caused its banning.
Such marketing methods are successful because they bypass the human forebrain where rational decisions are made, and directly target the amygdala, our older, reptilian brain which governs emotions and fight-or-flight responses. Since marketing is a key flywheel of our current form of industrial society and its GDP-measured economic growth, it is rarely challenged, even by CSR advocates or screening methods SRI investors. Another reason marketing won its role in framing our mass media and politics is because it can invoke the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment to our Constitution. The recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited funds on media and political campaigns equated “speech” with “money” and companies as the same as “persons.” Thus, we will see even more unethical marketing practices manipulating consumers and voters.
This is why I founded the EthicMark® for Advertising that Uplifts the Human Spirit and Society in 2004, now administered with my colleagues at the World Business Academy. We know that marketing can also be a powerful force for good, and thus, we recognize the highest standards with our EthicMark awards. We have also launched a video and campaign in accordance with our EthicMark principles focusing on the latest, worst form of manipulation of our citizens’ buying behavior: neuromarketing. This misuses medical technologies, such as MRIs to scan the brain activity even of children, to try to pin point their responses to products – in order to bypass their rational choice and buy goods they may not need. So far, our pledge not to use neuromarketing has been signed by 700 individuals and companies. We hope many more companies will take the pledge. We will keep updating our results at www.worldbusiness.org and www.ethicalmarkets.com.
About Hazel Henderson
HAZEL HENDERSON is President of Ethical Markets Media and author of many books, including the latest, Ethical Markets: Growing The Green Economy( Chelsea Green, 2007). She is also the producer of the Ethical Markets television series on PBS and the Documentary Channel. Henderson is Co-founder of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators (updated regularly at www.Calvert-Henderson.com) and creator of the GREEN TRANSITION SCOREBOARD(tm), tracking total private investments in growing the green economy.
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