The Science of Consumer Pleasure

For a long time, corporations have been working to understand how to affect consumer behavior and influence more people to purchase their products. Market research has made some headway in this arena recently, explaining how the impulses that drive consumers to purchase are produced. Now, you may not realize it, but it turns out that what makes you feel good is a part of the brain dubbed “the pleasure center.” It’s this center that makes us feel happy when kissed, that drives us to eat our favorite foods or play our favorite games, that makes us want to relax on the beach.

Laboratory tests have shown that rats who can control their pleasure centers with a switch will literally jump at the opportunity to do so. Scientists set up electrical pulses that control the pleasure centers of rats’ brains and found that the rats would sacrifice anything to continuously pounce towards the levers and experience electrical bursts of happiness. Disturbingly, rather than eat or sleep, these rats flipped their switches without end, stopping only when they died of sheer exhaustion… 

Now, corporations are seeing what implications this experiment could have for product marketing. By studying the brain waves of consumers eating snack food products, researchers found that the participants felt pleasure due to the messiness of the food they were eating. The Frito Lay Corporation, in fact, decided to use this finding to enhance its product advertising. By using “neuromarketing” research for these advertisements, they won a 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award from the Advertising Research Foundation.

The ambiguity as to what intent corporations will have in utilizing neuromarketing has led to some understandable concerns. After all, nobody wants to be mindlessly jumping towards products like the research lab rats jumping towards their pleasure switches. But some think corporations will not go in this direction; rather some think that corporations will use the findings to help determine what will drive consumers to purchase their products, and they will use this knowledge for marketing purposes only. These findings can also make sense of what cultural differences exist between different regions—and what pleasure means in them—in order to provide insight into what types of different marketing practices should be used for international consumers.

Academics are also interested in how pleasure is processed by the brain, but they have different goals. Rather than sell products, academics are often more interested in exactly how the brain functions. However, when considering the obvious factor that money must be made, you can bet that corporations will be observing academics performing research on the science of pleasure with a watchful eye.