Neuromarketing: How Brands are Manipulating Your Brain | Consumer Decisions Documentary

my name is marie and i am a liberated woman i lead my life as i wish which is why i've chosen this brand the skin cream i can't do without it the sensation when i apply it it's a real pleasure when i get home from the gym i often stop at this burger restaurant i love it smell and the toasted bread and it's so nice inside i reserve my train tickets through this travel agency there are so many images there that make me want to get a return trip to the sunshine it's like my bank i recently changed over to this credit company i took out a loan for what i need to buy for the kids my name is marie and i'm a liberated woman all these products because i'm worth it well marie do you really think you're a free and liberated woman do you know the smell of fast food is deliberately designed to produce an emotional reaction the travel pictures are deliberately chosen to arouse your desires the bank slogan is specially created to play on your fears [Music] and your body cream has been developed to spark a desire from within your brain you didn't realize that of course why should you it's all calculated using the latest technology from neuroscience like an mri or an electroencephalogram these new sales methods have a specific technique to control your brain it's called neuromarketing but my dear consumers you're not meant to know about it neura marketing is a taboo subject among the companies of the 21st century come on activate your neurons we'll introduce you to the best kept secrets of the major brands you know well [Music] one marketing company has exceptionally agreed to show us how one mass-market retailer studies your behavior and incites you to buy we meet up in central paris a typical looking building and whoops this is our floor on the door somewhat unusual sign and inside not a parisian apartment but a supermarket we call this an experimental store and it's in this kind of shop that will ask people to pretend to do their shopping it allows us to study their behavior eric sanglo works for bva a market study agency whose clients include some well-known brands that test new packaging and placements on a store's shelves from his observation post eric sangler tracks the consumer sliders reaction in the stores aisles they're volunteers from the public in the street below each wears a strange looking pair of glasses worth 20 000 euros using a system of red dots the glasses record each movement of the eye to the nearest millisecond it's known as an eye tracker now here you can see she's looking in a specific area for a product that interests her and it's what we call a direct purchase something she hasn't looked at too closely we've also put on the glasses suddenly we seem to see everything so much more clearly they demonstrate exactly which elements spark our impulse to buy something without us knowing by analyzing the look in its direction can you analyze what's going on inside the brain somehow and to better understand how the human brain works and how individuals reach the decisions that they take for example how the shape of the spoon in the mashed potato the color uh or the design of the mash's image will capture one's attention so we'll go some way to explaining the elements that help us playing with your subconscious to make you buy something is the aim of this new high-tech marketing which makes us think of a word that like marketing begins with an m manipulation let's check the dictionary manipulation the state of being manipulated shrewd or devious management especially for one's own advantage without the subject's knowledge without the subject's knowledge here precisely is the new tool of bba the first neuromarketing device being developed in france the electromyograph its inventor is olivier drewler a researcher in neuroscience nestle and l'oreal have already signed up to test their ads using this machine it's subconscious but every time you watch advertising your brain receives and acts on millions of different bits of information they provoke emotions you're not even aware of the electrodes on the face and fingers allow these to be tracked there's one muscle it's called a zygomatic or smiling muscle even if the muscle itself doesn't smile of course you can detect an electromyographic impulse that's the corrugator which is activated during mostly negative emotions this method is interesting because it detects subtle discrete and often subconscious emotions the importance of the subconscious as marketing is not hard to understand here's an ad for a mcdonald's new line of hamburger he's so cute he's so chubby oh you're too cute some tabasco a bun scattered with paprika a new red chili pepper the reactions of the human guinea pig are registered by the different curves now that's more than just an impulse it's almost at maximum we can level say there was a strong positive emotion after the test olivier roules asks the lady at what point did she feel more emotion [Music] well before there was a little emotion but the peak comes when we see the pack shot is the image of the product it was at this point that the lady became excited and there was an emotional peak i'm a little bit surprised as i thought uh it was more the character herself i didn't think it would be the brand that influenced me [Music] the impact is not just coincidence but the results of our brain being worked on from an early age it's something you notice by conducting a little experiment in a class in a parisian school good morning boys and girls i'm going to show you some pictures under which there are some words written when you don't recognize them you say i don't know but when you do recognize them and the more you recognize shout out its name all the kids in this class are barely five years old [Music] euros very good great [Music] nothing surprising so far then but [Music] now even louder [Music] how can mcdonald's have made such an impact on five-year-olds [Music] a simple test in front of one of their restaurants provides the answer who decided to go to mcdonald's the kids the kids why does the child like it because there's a toy inside that's it it's just for the toy he doesn't even eat he just plays with the toy i have three kids that's three toys oh for the toy definitely uh eats hardly anything does your child get upset if you don't go to mcdonald's yes there you are look right now he's all crossed and this is mcdonald's weapon of mass attraction this toy which may not look like much but it's highly profitable this is a confidential document from a u. s association of mcdonald franchisees it shows that 95 percent of families that visit mcdonald's do so as a result of their kids [Music] in the game of cat and mouse children have little hope of escaping the clutches of mcdonald's the brand has made sure it will indelibly mark their spirits [Applause] man who introduced toys to mcdonald's has agreed to be interviewed he lives in a remote part of arizona and to find him takes you down many windswept dusty roads to be honest we did get lost at one point but we did finally find his ranch [Music] before retiring with his wife and horses roy bergold was in charge of world marketing for mcdonald's he worked for the fast food giant for more than 30 years it started in uh 1969 so that was a long time ago and we didn't we only had uh like i said we had about 600 restaurants in the united states and uh none internationally and now i think they're in about i'm not totally sure but i think they're in about 140 countries now and i started about a hundred countries the man who knows all the secrets of the multinational brand agrees for the first time to talk money on camera he denies nothing about the methods mcdonald's used to become one of the wealthiest brands in the world and he explains why ray kroc the company founder decided to focus on children if you can get the child at you know four five six years old to come to mcdonald's he's probably going to continue to come as a teenager and as an adult and then to bring his kids so ray always said if you have one dollar to spend on marketing spend it on kids marketing giving a hamburger to a friend the toy was the first marketing strategy aimed at attracting children with the clown ambassador ronald mcdonald 50 gift certificates to everyone it's a nice way to say [Music] advertising featured restaurants schools it reached its target to associate mcdonald's with a brand stamping field good factor in the minds of future customers [Music] that way you're not you're not a commercial you're not there telling kids to do something you're simply giving a message that's important to that kid and to his parents and his teachers and whatever ronald is less than evidence these days here's the happy meal a new character that's very successful mcdonald's has an annual turnover of 47 billion we just plant the idea of fast food mcdonald's in their mind and again that translates into i'm hungry i think i'll go get something fast that's mcdonald's and that's sales and that's the way it works that's marketing muscle and we do know that if you can be top of mind with a person in other words if they think i'm hungry mcdonald's that's going to be great that's going to get you a lot of business so we really believed in the power of marketing and how we could be uh how we could have the top of mind awareness of a customer a little further to the west of arizona in san francisco for the first time a suit has been filed against mcdonald's for using this type of marketing strategy [Music] began with a housewife and mother in sacramento california monet param has a four-year-old and an eight-year-old daughter and a collection of knickknacks gathered during their stops at the fast food chain for months now she's been in a legal wrangle with mcdonald's she wants the company to stop influencing kids by using presents i think it's it's disgusting you know they're going any way they can to get to these small children so they can get a hook in them and keep them as customers for life but you cannot say no i mean absolutely your mother's the duties absolutely and i say no all the time i say i i say no all the time but i also don't want them hearing in terms of marketing that hey this is cool you should get you know this meal because you can get this toy and then you get all the fat and the sugar and the salt that comes with it it sort of normalizes the behavior for young children it's okay because barbie's you know label is on it you know they're not able to think that through and process it that in a way that helps them make a healthy decision so i have to do that for them and have to say to a company like mcdonald's i want you to stop talking to my kids lauren i just need a few minutes okay money param is not alone in this fight an increasing number of americans accuse mcdonald's of taking advantage of children's vulnerability in addition the city of san francisco has now banned toys from being provided in the happy meals activate disguise legislators in new york are thinking of doing the same at stanford university a pediatrician has proved the impact of such marketing on children tom robinson used an enlightening method he placed some french fries in mcdonald's packaging and some in a plain unmarked box he then asked 60 children to try them and this is what he found out overwhelmingly kids thought the food or their kids pointed towards the food from mcdonald's that they thought was from mcdonald's even though all the food was the same if they thought a food came from mcdonald's they actually thought it tasted better so not just whether they would choose it and not just whether they they wanted it but actually whether it tasted better to them yes dear parents educating your little darlings has made no easier when one brand shapes their taste buds from the age of three to the extent of making them prefer its products to all the rest ice [Music] the major brands can do this because they know how to penetrate deep inside the front part of the brain the prefrontal cortex u. s researcher samuel mcclure made the discovery for several years he's been scanning customers using an mri of magnetic resonance imaging scan the large electromagnetic machine detects the flow of blood to the activated parts of the brain you're going to go in you'll lie down in this bed and it's going to slide you in about up to your waist all right now there are some really important things because we're measuring your brain activity so you have to stay really still that's a big deal in 2004 samuel mcclure conducted an experiment that gave rise to neuromarketing inside the mri the guinea pigs were given pepsi and coke without being told which was which a majority preferred the pepsi when they were told which brand before drinking three quarters preferred coke as soon as you have brand information the pattern of brain activity changed entirely we got recruitment of the prefrontal cortex which then we believe biases these sort of more basic structures related to taste so biases them to actually respond more vigorously and make you think that you actually like this more by being embedded in our brains at a very young age a brand like mcdonald's can make us become addicted to its products i'm hungry i think i'll go get something fast that's the mcdonald's doesn't stop there in its attempts to influence the public during our investigation we discover mcdonald's has been using customers brains to try out artificial flavors [Music] we managed to speak to one of those responsible for these secret studies on condition of anonymity he revealed what happened this is not mind science fiction we're able to get consumers off that brand put them in a brain scanning machine measure their emotional response when we presented them with the fragrance now that project is still under test but positionally and theoretically the brand is very interested in this concept has it been applied in some restaurants it has been applied successfully in some restaurants in germany and france and one or two in the uk or can they measure that changing the fragrance was successful they did brand perception research and they saw seven percent increase in the brand perception index now what they're doing is uh looking at the distribution chain to work out how they can implement it fully we have a document that details the study it explains that if the flavor is too obviously present rational thought will uncover the ploy that will then become ineffective as part of the test mcdonald's apparently placed some of the odor in its cleaning products to subtly be diffused without the clients realizing what was happening today it's been proven that a smell that provokes a positive emotion will increase sales procter gamble one of the world's biggest mass-market retailers used an artificial perfume under the lid of one of its washing liquid brands ariel as a result sales increased by 70 percent martin lindstrom knows this kind of method well the dane is one of the most successful neuro marketing consultants among his clients is mcdonald's [Music] smallies is the only sense we have which is bypassing the rational part of our brains and go straight to the emotional part of the brain and even though i would tell you that they're manipulating that smell i would still not be able to say hey i don't want to be affected by it because that smell goes straight to the emotional part of my brain so the rational feel that cannot say hey don't be affected by it we know what you're thinking from now on [Music] by experimenting on its customers brains and using a perfume that will make us buy more is the company really respecting its ethical charter [Music] on its website the company claims we operate our business ethically sound ethics is good business we ask mcdonald's directly but the company refuses any comment in three successive emails it denies the charge and states mcdonald's has never conducted any neuromarketing studies and yet we tracked down the company that surveyed consumers in mri machines on behalf of mcdonald's it's called neuroscience and is based in london [Music] on the internet it lists its major clients they include gsk a pharmaceutical laboratory unilever and mcdonald's okay versus boss is gemma calvert [Music] our work centers on making sure a product an advertisement or a smell will act positively on the consumer's brain what's known as the reward circuit it's the holy grail for all companies this small region which lies deep in the limbic system part of the reward network this is the nucleus accumbens and it has lots of dopamine neurons so dopamine is the kind of feel-good molecule which is in the brain and it's expressed for example during sex it's expressed with cocaine and other pleasurable experiences such as looking at products you can activate the same part of the brain that people who are taking drugs or something like that that's right these are all reward centers they're pleasure areas of the brain which is why people buy them so much [Music] so this is the future that lies in store for us thanks to neuro marketing it's what might happen to your brain by simply walking into a shop tempting isn't it website you have several brands you have mcdonald's yeah we work for a range of companies um and across a very broad range of their products and uh for a very large number of questions with those companies and you are able to see what you do for this company of course we have ndas um with many companies just like any other market research company what do you mean by i've got to stop there sorry restricted by a confidentiality agreement gemma calvert cannot talk about mcdonald's but another researcher will prove far more enlightening we meet at oxford university's department of experimental psychology and going into the laboratory we discovered no actually what we see is this the professor who specializes in euro marketing and who took part in the studies for the fast food giant before the interview charles spence says he won't mention mcdonald's name on camera listen carefully to what he has to say he's a little bothered but what he does say is very interesting [Music] i've done involved in a project for one of the uh burger chains were interested in launching store fragrance so they funded a number of projects to try and say can brain scanning as one of those techniques help us to choose perfume a b or c and there what the researchers were looking for was an increase in the blood flow in the parts of the brain uh responding sort of uh flavor and reward when one fragrance was paired with mcdonald's imagery so you showed the logo of mcdonald's and then you make people smell the new fragrance so um for the burger chain i'm saying which one oh you said you're just saying it was baghdad you did no no you said dude i said a burger all right let's check with a mcdonald's imagery with a mcdonald's imagery uh was the question again the researcher says the majority of people scanned were women typically with two children kids don't forget one of mcdonald's principal target consideration [Music] then when he doesn't realize he's being filmed charles pence will give us the very proof we've been looking for and here they are mcdonald's small artificial perfume bottles one of the mcdonald's fragrances and it does indeed smell nice so it was to diffuse on the product or store in store that's one of the other ones because it doesn't smell uh burger no exactly fruity bit floral for healthy for healthy rebranding this kind of practice is completely hidden from the client something commercial alert a us consumer association has strongly condemned jeffrey chester is its spokesperson we show him the interview to choose between two fragrance when one fragrance was paired with a mcdonald's imagery versus one of the other ones when mcdonald's is testing its products to see whether or not it increases the blood flow to the brain what it really says is that consumers are not being given a fair chance have any choice so consumers today are being heavily influenced by multiple neuromarketing campaigns that raise questions about how long will we be able to engage in truly independent action mcdonald's still refuses to respond to our various interview requests so we had to interview them at a conference called let's dare france a forum apparently for companies who dare the head of mcdonald's france is there of course and is about to speak and the executive vice president for mcdonald's europe luckily it's open to the media and yes that's us down there yes it's true i started up mcdonald's here in 1985.

we had just 17 restaurants then france now represents 4. 2 billion in turnover in a few years we have not just become the second largest market after the united states but we've also learned how to dare when sometimes it's better to say sorry than to ask permission it's quicker especially for the large multinationals [Music] after the speech it's our turn to ask a few questions hello mr petty elise from france tv we've sent several interview requests to your office and since we never received a reply i'm daring to interview you now have you dared to use neuro marketing techniques in the mcdonald's group no neuromarketing no no i said no we don't use that sort of technique well the thing is we have definite information that shows you placed mothers of children in mri scans in the uk mainly to test new odors that might then be used in mcdonald's outlets so we know that yes you have used it i don't know what they might do in england that's not my responsibility but it would surprise me a lot actually because i don't see the point of artificial smells well that's exactly what they are no i didn't think that was done in england i can assure you it was well you'll need to prove it ah but i can prove it it was done through the intermediary of a company neuroscience and by a university professor called charles spence who was also involved in the research and who confirmed it and provided documents showing that it was carried out well show me the documents that i doubt it doesn't shock you to put mums inside an mri scan to see what's happening inside their brains i would be deeply shocked because that's not the way our company works and to answer your question at the risk of contradicting you or not at all your answer would be great i categorically deny it i don't doubt it but we're certain of our facts there's just one professor who gave you some information no no no no we're absolutely sure of it and besides neuroscens as the company is the company that use the mri scans and they've even put you on their website where you're quoted as being clients excuse me but this interview is over and i'm asking you to stop so make an appointment uh you'd agreed to be interviewed of course all right you've been investigating this for six months so i would like to give you detailed answers let me be precise right now these measures are not being taken in france jean-pierre petty seems to not be aware then the the tests conducted by his company [Music] after a meeting france television and ourselves received a registered letter from the company it states our information is false and threatens legal action if we broadcast it but a few days later mcdonald's suddenly agrees to an interview we're told to meet them in a smart central paris hotel our interviewee is pierre vocek who is the head of brand strategy in europe we believe that he's responsible for the mcdonald's surveys [Music] has the company ever used euro marketing well in 2006 we had a problem raised by a consumer who told us we had an odor problem in a restaurant so yes we tried to find a scent that could solve this problem and which wasn't a food smell so we decided to find a scent that could suit the mcdonald's brand okay so was neuro marketing used yes or no there was a new system that would allow us to see if the smell would match the mcdonald's brand it's important to know what happened anyway so then you place women in mri's we did put mothers inside with the smell and brand images to see if the two would match inside mris right yes yes we agree on in mris i want us to be clear can you confirm whether or not in 2006 through the neuroscience company whether or not mothers were placed in mris to taste some smells and images of mcdonald's they were put there to test images in mris some in mris thank you mr boyzek for admitting that so you say it all led to nothing no it was not successful at all we tested three odors in restaurants consumers said you see a perfume like that is used in several places it has to go through the air conditioning system we didn't want to do that for reasons of hygiene the information we have is that it was placed in cleaning products exactly we wanted to do that instead of having that slight chemical smell we wanted to put it in hygiene products but it proved impossible because it meant the companies who provided the cleaning products would have had to radically change their formulation so we left it do you regret it today are you asking me what i think of neuroscience yes yes i have no regrets if you ask whether at the time we thought it would be harmful no not one person thought it was wrong but does new marketing offend you today yes i wouldn't use it at the time people who did they didn't think they were doing anything wrong you included when we did the study when we saw the result yes by trying to compare a smell with a brand and whether it was bad by placing people in mris listen when i saw it i was greatly surprised i i did find it surprising did i think there was a huge ethical problem at the time no no if i understand you well mr what you're saying here and now is that mcdonald's will never use neuromarketing techniques again is that right yes yes in any case as long as i'm here i can say yes more and more companies are specializing in euro marketing these days i was born with the power to read your brain activity i'm a g neuroscience is the study of the brain here's a promo [Music] requests for an interview but since we were in the neighborhood anyway we rang their doorbell and brought a hidden camera with us nice to meet you and we uh you know i'm sorry but we we don't work this way so what do you mean well we can't accommodate you if you just show up on our doorstep so uh actually you said that you don't want to communicate with french tv no no that's not the case we're simply too busy is it correct that you're walking and subconscious of people here oh absolutely that's what we do we test people's subconscious responses to stimuli that's the nature of our business we work for a hewlett packard we work for google microsoft i'm i'm only going to talk about the client list that is approved so okay but uh listen to me yeah okay i am very busy right now i've explained our position and i don't have any more time to spend with you i'm sorry you see [Music] but refuse to talk about it [Music] and yet this is serious stuff neurofocus is even associated with eric candle the noble laureate for medicine [Music] the crisis is impacting the consumer's wallet but companies don't want to see their sales fall encouraged by their marketing departments they call them businesses such as these in complete secrecy they scrutinize the brain patterns of their clients to play on their emotions their urges and their subconscious [Music] their aim is to push them to buy even more these techniques aren't very ethical which may explain why the companies that use them are reluctant to give interviews [Music] but one euro marketing consultant allows us in on one of their training sessions [Music] this frenchman lives on the west coast of the states and set up his own business called sales brain his customers today are businessmen from oregon some own restaurants others sell agricultural material or even washing machines good morning what if you could discover a buy button inside the brain of your customers what if you could learn what it takes to actually push that by button inside the brain and what if all it took to do this was two hours of your time this morning patrick ramosa doesn't use mri scans his company has developed a method that merges neuroscience and sales techniques but guess what the thinking portion of the brain is really a decision influencer but it is not the decision maker it's not the boss but the actual part of the brain that triggers the decision is called the reptilian brain and the reptilian brain is the top of the stem and the portion that unites both hemispheres makes sense we decide at the level of a crocodile of a reptile why because exercises to help patrick teaches his clients to touch the primary instincts to incite the act of buying and the reptilian brain is the realm of the pain and the fears it's really the realm of the subconsciousness so your job if you want to be successful is not to stop at the wish and the wants and the needs of your customers but really to drill inside the iceberg until you find their pain and then to develop a business whose objective will be to eliminate that pain a four-hour session is enough to convince the businessman boy we came really close right we arrived second it does kind of freak me out it freaks me out that that's why i do things and those who get really good at it can get me to do this by utilizing those techniques oh yeah absolutely but that's business i'm sure an argument could be made that um it's manipulation but um it's what is it's what's driving our world there's always a danger of manipulating people but on the other hand when the method of decision making is public knowledge it's also the responsibility of the consumer to understand what companies do to sell their products now i want you to keep your eyes on this little locket your eyes are burning but can one be aware of it when you talk directly to our reptile brain you can hardly keep them patrick brownwozza's life is spent traveling all around the world to spread the word of neuromarketing for several years he's been coming back to france at the request of big companies here he is a niece a few hours before he's due to give a speech to a large french company but this time we're not allowed to record what will happen your client doesn't want to talk about it no my client doesn't want to talk about it as once again euro marketing in france is a bit of a taboo subject people in france often confuse manipulation and conviction careful now the logic of the next argument is not that easy to follow you need to understand how to push your proposition a little by saying that if your glass is now half full your glass is more than half full you shouldn't say that it's more than half full while making your client understand that it's not half empty lost right well we were too so your client needs to think the glass is half full or half empty [Applause] patrick ramboza refuses to name his client today but we think that a company that it's telling its sales forces about neuro marketing is not just any old business so we look around nice and find out that 230 salesmen are staying in a large downtown hotel they're here to take part in a conference hosted by patrick ramos their employer is archaea a subsidiary of the credit mutual bank these bankers jobs are to sell financial products to companies as well as to public institutions such as local communes or health authorities [Applause] so how does newer marketing fit into this with a hidden camera we approach the salesman as they're leaving the conference i was wondering what you learned this morning and what benefit is it to you what i retain mainly is the reptile brain that purchasing is linked to the subconscious well i've learned that we need to anticipate what the brain really wants and i've learned how to understand what the brain wants without them knowing do you think the applications might be contentious well yes of course because it's almost like manipulation a bit it's a good technique because it can be applied to finance and other products as well what sort of products are you selling actually financial ones insurance [Music] we're probably naive but to us the credit mutual france's fourth favorite bank used to be this i've got some bad news oh yeah well what would you do if father christmas doesn't exist what are we talking about you're dreaming you don't think they're selling financial products just because they're good for you well yeah credibility more than ever the bank to talk to the credit mutual may be the bank to talk to but not necessarily the bank to get interviews from it refuses interviews adding via email this conference is only goal was to open people's minds about a subject which might be of interest to salesmen and besides we don't see any ethical problems we call one of those responsible up by phone and then everything seems clearer it might be counterproductive for us to appear as if we practice neuromarketing purely to enter into our customers brain you know what i mean [Laughter] it's to be able to almost subliminally touch someone who might be right there right right in front of you i'm still intrigued because one can manipulate people by the way you behave by the way you speak in exactly the same way in france a philosopher who follows the trends of consumer society has risen up against this use of neuroscience for purely commercial ends from the moment neuroscience is involved it allows one to intervene directly on the reptilian layers of the brain i receive or i give those are the levels of the reptilian brain what makes neuromarketing work today is the use made of the immediate reaction that's because there's a reaction that can be very easily manipulated when you know how to take advantage of this you can manipulate people as if they were puppets you press the button and it provides a reaction that's what's so worrying about it in theory there are laws limiting this kind of practice marketing studies using mri scans are actually banned by law in france public health rules of the civil code only allow experiments on human beings for strictly scientific or medical purposes [Music] what happens before the advertising when i'm showing this logo before i've seen the ad 10 times and after i've seen the ad more than 10 times there are long term functional changes in the brain so who's the ultimate client what i say is i work for market research groups after the speech and still on camera arnold petra reels off a list of his clients sfr maaf insurance cartier and sncf french railways petra doesn't wish to talk about this last client again it's a matter of a confidentiality clause but why would french railways use newer marketing we tracked down someone who was involved in the survey he was an intermediary between the railways and arnold petra's belgian company he described the experiments on condition of anonymity [Music] what the sncf was testing on customers brains was its online ticket sales site french railways told us its main target or targets and it invited its website users to surf the internet you may be looking for a train ticket from paris to brussels or from paris allele online and you're invited to sign up to buy a ticket what we do is to evaluate how easy or difficult it may be so you use the mri scan to sell tickets exactly to a volunteer oh yes and we try out different versions on the computer top rights are the web pages that have been tested in the center is the image and color of the zones of the brain that have been more active during the experiment so you check whether the reward circuit has been activated by a web page precisely the reward circuit french railways asked them to test one page with a background picture of a pine tree and then one without the pine tree we tested reaction to various perfumes that resembled pine trees and in the part of the brain that recognizes smell what's known as the olfactory cortex we noticed some activity so in parts for the imagination it worked in other words it did smell of pine a little so on top of the page there's something about strasbourg for the christmas holidays so if the smell makes your imagination think of christmas and christmas trees all the better as it makes the offer tangible they said they wanted people to buy tickets more easily without hassle and find the information they needed quicker times have changed on the railways the days of steam are long gone and buying your fare from a human being at the ticket counter may soon disappear too everything seems to be happening far quicker these days more than 60 million tickets are sold by sncf each year on its website the seat which is quite remarkably interested in what your brain is up to is also france's leading online travel agency and that's something french railway seems quite determined to get into your skull everyone should know that sncf also sells airline tickets we have all the solutions plane tickets car rental voyagersncf. com is more than just about trains you'll soon get used to it voyagesncf.

com will take you further than you might have thought we asked the head of the sncf travel agency yves tirod if they hadn't gone just a little bit over the top what i'd like to know is what kind of study you conducted and how precisely you conducted it to establish what people liked or didn't like well first we asked different types of customers because well travel sncf. com is a special site in a way it's the site of all the french people it's a site visited by about 80 of french internet users well you'd like to be inside the customer's head to know exactly how they feel when they visit your site wouldn't you of course do you use any neuro marketing techniques we did actually use some yes oh so you what we wanted to know was if the customer's brain spontaneously reacted positively or not to the site by placing some of your customers in the mris to see their reaction in their brains is that right i'm not explaining myself well we know that this technology exists but it's not a technology that we use in travel sncf.