Brain scans break the mould for market mavens
Brain waves in the service of consumer research: Dr Gountas, right, and Dr Ciorciari.
Market researchers and neuroscientists from La Trobe University's School of Business and Swinburne University's Brain Sciences Institute have confirmed in hard data what previous studies have demonstrated empirically – that most informed consumers fall into one of four broad personality groups whose personal preferences correlate predictably with consumer behaviour.
The work was carried out by La Trobe senior lecturer in Marketing Dr John Gountas and Swinburne neuroscientist Dr Joseph Ciorciari.
Using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor the brainwaves of 42 volunteers during psychological tests, they first scanned their subjects' brainwaves to define personality types, then crossreferenced the scans with earlier studies to predict how they will behave as consumers.
Their test results broke the mould for the marketing industry's most celebrated consumer group – the influential 'market mavens' – popularly targeted as drivers of consumer attitudes and behaviours because of their propensity for product-savvy word-of-mouth advertising.
Usually well-educated professionals of both genders, market mavens have a higher-than-average knowledge of the best places to go, the best restaurants, retail outlets and holiday destinations, and the best value-for-money products – and are assumed to form a broad-banded consumer market segment spanning all product categories.
However, the EEG brainwaves revealed that these much-pursued specific product category market mavens are not one homogenous consumer group at all, but different groups according to different product affinities – including one group that is specifically responsive to restaurants and food and hospitality outlets and others that pride themselves on inside-track knowledge of most other products.
According to their alpha-beta-gammadelta waves, the mavens divided into 'foodie and lifestyle' mavens, and 'allproduct' mavens.
The theory was – and the Gountas- Ciorciari experiments confirmed – that mavens are compelled to trade market gossip because it suits their personalities.
The researchers tested this by correlating and comparing the brainwaves of the two newly-defined maven groups against the four key personality orientation types.
Based on their psychological responses to questions and images, the volunteers confirmed the researchers' principal hypothesis: across their ranks they each fitted one of four key personality categories, broadly defined by a variation of new Jungian and Myers-Brigg Type Indicator personality traits. These categories are classified as thinking/ logical, feeling/emotional, material/ physical and intuitive/imaginative. According to Dr Gountas the EEG results have significantly shifted the research parameters in this field, for the first time underpinning the behaviour and motives of market mavens with empirically soundly-based personality theory.
This, he says, has implications for the food and restaurant industry specifically, but also for market researchers, airlines and other tourism and hospitality industries, government agencies, health and social welfare groups, learning organisations, relationship counsellors, futurists – and even political lobbyists.
'The idea of using neuroscientific research tools like EEG brain scans, was to find a better way to do consumer behaviour research and use the best research tools available to understand the way consumers make decisions,' Dr Gountas says.