I guess that almost everybody interested in both neuroscience and marketing has ever heard about so-called “Pepsi paradox”. Anyway, let me remind you, what stands behind this fascinating phenomena. In blind taste tests subjects tend to prefer Pepsi over Coke or have no reliable preference for one cola over the other. The paradox is that people exhibit a preference for Coke when brand information is available (e.g. in a supermarket), but no reliable preference for Coke when no brand information is available (e.g. in blind taste tests). And what is important, the existence of “Pepsi paradox” was also tested experimentally using fMRI methodology. Even today this experiment, originally published by McClure and his colleagues in 2004, is cited as one of the most important findings at the edge between neuoroscience and our understanding of advertising effects on the brain. But it not only deserves to such acclaim but also opens a venue for other questions. Does it mean that advertising can change physical structure of human brains in that way which results in forming neural representations of brands in turn being able to bias consumer’s behaviour? Do we really have somehow implemented “Lovemarks” as, I suppose, many advertisers believe? I must admit that support for such assumptions is even stronger now than ever.
Recently, Michael Koenigs and Daniel Tranel, have taken up with this issue in an article published by peer-reviewed journal. But they have completely changed perspective. In their study only patients with a damage (due to different reasons) of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) were examined. It is exactly the same structure which exhibit activation in a labelled (explicit) Pepsi or Coke test and it’s probably part of the brain responsible for brand preference (of course among other things, for more see e,g. Damasio “Descartes Error”). So, if “Pepsi paradox” really exists and McClure is right, they should not be biased by brand preference and prefer the same beverage as they do in a blind taste test. And this hypothesis has been thoroughly confirmed! Only one but persuasive quotation from article:
“In sum, we show that the normal influence of brand information on cola preference (the so-called ‘Pepsi paradox’) is not present among patients with VMPC damage and defects in emotional processing. This result suggests that VMPC is a critical neural substrate for the effect of commercial brand information on human decision-making.”
In fact, these subjects are ”brand blinded” because their brains cannot form an implicit brand preference and they can rely only on consciously recollected preferences. But we can make a step further and hypothesize that VMPC activation differs individually (because of age, gender and other factors) also in healthy subjects e.g. in terms of time necessary to form brand association and degree of impact on behaviour or attitude change. Such assumption would have had important managerial implications for business people which could be formulated as follows: if we really differed individually in our “brand blindness”, it should be somehow implemented in a marketing strategy e.g. in a phase of building media plans (because even large GRPs couldn’t guarantee success if a new brand is launched)? Of course, it’s premature for such considerations but on the other hand our knowledge how brains react to advertising communication is growing so fast...
