Going straight to the brain for marketing insights

BY Nathan Jolly

May 29, 2025 10:59

Going straight to the brain for marketing insights

Neuroscience is increasingly showing that the self-reported studies that form the backbone of marketing research are flawed.

Dr Shannon Bosshard, founder of brand health tracking platform GreyMattr, presented a series of compelling neuroscience findings at Mumbrella 360 on Wednesday afternoon.

He was joined by Phillip Ely, strategy and marketing lead at GreyMattr. Ely has been a media communications strategist in agencies for two decades. The two of them believe that neuroscience is “about to reinvent the way we look at the brain.”

Ely started the Mumbrella 360 session by challenging the current methods used by marketers and agencies for tracking brain health.

The use of cognitive psychology and self-reporting to understand and influence consumer behaviour isn’t flawed as such, he says, but neuroscience offers better methods.

“Your brand health tracking isn’t wrong, but it’s probably not as right as you want it to be,” Ely said.

Ely said that part of the problem is that challenging the conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily in most marketers’ best interest.

“Admitting something core to how we work might not be 100% right can open a can of worms that we just don’t want to have to deal with. So we kind of go ahead on the premise that it’s rock solid, knowing that we can’t get in too much trouble from our bosses for following something that we’ve always used, that everyone else relies on.”

The problem, Ely explains, is the human brain wasn’t designed for the constant flow of information that we get these days. “Humans only process less than 5% of the sensory stimuli that hits us every single day,” he says.

“That means 95-plus percent is all processed subconsciously by our brain. It’s storing away perceptions and biases that can influence our behaviour without us ever consciously recognising that.”

Ely says this is why surveys can often fail to give an accurate picture.

“These self-reported survey methodologies that we use to analyse brand recognition, perceptions, purchase preferences, all of those kind of things, they’re always going to struggle to accurately reflect consumer attitudes and behaviours, for the main part because so many of those things are influenced by stuff that happens in our subconscious that we never actually appreciate and recognise in our conscious brain.

“So when we’re asked how we feel about brands, why we did or didn’t buy them, we’ll construct what we think the right answer should be, rather than admitting that we don’t know why we took the action or we don’t know what we did.

“We just can’t explain things that we don’t consciously perceive. The true nuance of brand health tracking and the power that is held by brands in our brains is locked in that subconscious file storage in our brain. ”

This leads to electroencephalography, or EEG. The first EEG system came out in 1925, and Dr Bosshard said in the past 100 years, science has “done a pretty poor job of explaining how we get from these squiggles on a page to something that is usable.

“Generally, when we talk about squiggles on a page, in science, when there’s something that we don’t understand or we don’t have a full grasp of, we tend to bucket it into this domain of voodoo or magic.

“We don’t really understand how those lines actually equate to some kind of behavioural output.”

As a result of that, marketers lean on self-reporting because it feels more objective, Bosshard says.

“We process so much more information subconsciously that we don’t have access to — somewhere in the realm of 11 million bits of sensory information comes in every second — we’re only consciously processing about 40 bits, which is the equivalent of about four or five words.

“Using neuroscience, we can actually tap into those processes to understand what effect those 11 million bits have had on things like brand perception, purchase intentions.”

The EEG works by fitting a participant with “basically a swimming cap that’s filled with electrodes.”

The scientists monitor the electrical activity the brain creates while the person is completing a task, “whether that’s smelling something, tasting something, touching or looking at something – whatever the sensory input is.”

EEG Machine

He continues: “We are looking at the different structures of the brain – which of them are active, how active they are, and then what they’re responsible for.”

Bosshard explains how law enforcement agencies have used EEG headsets on suspects, showing them pictures of a crime scene and seeing whether their brain showed recognition of those different images.

“Those squiggles, you can actually turn them into meaningful output – so meaningful that you can convict people based on what their brain says.”

Bosshard said, in essence, what we have access to, is a lie detector.

“The implications from a branding perspective, is that traditional market research has people scroll through maybe two or three minutes of content, in a simulated environment, and then immediately afterwards, you ask them a survey. ‘Hey, do you remember this ad?’ Of course they do. It was within the last 90 seconds.'”

Neuroscience offers more.

“You can go beyond what the consumer is able to tell us, and whether they’ve scrolled over an Instagram ad for half a second, or they’re walking past a Cartology ad as they’re scrolling through the supermarket, maybe it’s processed in the periphery, or maybe they’re dual screening, or going under an underpass.

“Each of these exposures changes the way that the consumer responds, it’s just not reflected in their consciousness.

“We know that this is the case, and we know that we can measure it, because information is physically stored in the brain.”

Various brands have forged deep, complex, and varied pathways within our brains. Bosshard’s studies found that Subway occupies physical space within the area of the brain that is dedicated to processing smells, while McDonald’s has what he calls “visual equity” within the brain.

Bosshard did a pilot study that involved taking 300 brand names and showing them to people. “We were able to compile a list of each individual’s favourite brands, most disliked or most hated brands, neutral brands, brands they didn’t know.”

They then did conditioning, pairing a brand with something positive, then something negative, then recorded the brain changes.

“You do this over and over again, you send them away for a week, you bring them back. And what we found was that each brand elicits fundamentally a different response within the brain.

“So we can take that network and we can start to have a look at how strong a brand is in the mind of the consumer without even asking them whether they find it strong or not.”

The study also found that creating a strong brand, in terms of attitude, isn’t enough to actually create strong brand pathways.

“People might like your brand, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s converting to something that is actually strong in their mind.”

“Marlboro, based on self-report, people gave it about a 2 out of 10. However, the neuro score that we’re able to derive from that is fairly strong – because I imagine that most of the people that we tested have probably been exposed to Marlboro, at some point. Whether it’s negative or positive, it still had an effect on that network.”

Conversely, Porsche scored highly from a self-report point of view, but actually got a fairly low brain recall score.

“Probably because we haven’t been hugely exposed to Porsche. So there’s a fundamental difference between what we can detect via self-report and what the neuro score actually is.”

As legendary adman, David Ogilvy once said: “People don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.” We are the worst self-reporters, because we cannot possibly understand our own brains. But science can.

Or, as Bosshard puts it: “We can circumvent the need for consumers to talk because we can go directly to their brain.”