We Know What Your Brain is Thinking!

Well, at least we know how there are differences between responses to certain situations, or at least we think there are. A new market research technique is being used to read brain patterns of participants in studies. The article is interesting as Jim Meskauskas, comments that we don't need this expensive research to confirm what common sense can tell us. The example in the story is about the differences in reaction between men and women when watching a detergent ad, where the story line has a pregnant woman drop some ice-cream onto her shirt. Men apparently show now stress when the ice-cream falls nor relief when the shirt comes out of the washer clean, meanwhile women show a ray of emotions to the story line.

I have worked with similar systems in user research and it's always hard to determine how actionable this type of data is, and also how difficult it is to be concise with the variables, but it feels there could be some interesting uses of it to make the world continue to recognize how different we all are when we respond to situations, especially genders. Data and sizes of differences certainly speaks in the business world (whether it's even valid or not).