Marketers have always wanted to know what you are thinking, and thanks to several tech companies, they may have just gotten a step closer to having their wishes fulfilled. In December of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on how Emsense sensors were being used to extract feelings toward candidates in the political race.

That same company, Emsense Corporation, has used their technology to give marketers a step up on the competition (such as other advertisers - and you, the consumer).

By reading the EEG brainwaves from a light-weight portable headband, Emsense can derive meaning from the frequency, spikes and valleys, and translate it into quantitative scores on attention, and positive and negative emtional reaction.

This whole sub-industry of marketing, often called “neuromarketing”, is one of the hottest trends in the marketing world today, and it will likely have some positive and negative effects on the industry as time goes on.

Positive Outcomes

• Marketers will spend less money to get more impact for their clients, which means better efficiency.
• Marketers will learn how to segment the population in new ways, aside from just demographics and basic behavior.
• Marketers will be able to test new products and services in a more reliable manner, meaning lower costs to bring them to market, and a higher chance of them being successes.

Negative Outcomes

• The general public will become very wary of marketers and the marketing industry will suffer a backlash.
• New laws may be put in place to control how marketers use personal emotional information gleaned from peering into their emotions.
• This will only worsen privacy concerns.

Surely, this technology won’t only be used for marketing, and I can see psychologists using it to treat patients, as well as video games that reward you for “staying cool” despite scary situations showing up on a screen - a way to lower stress.

One of the major challenges neuromarketing still has to deal with is convincing the marketing mainstream of the strength of the correlation between recognizing the emotion and certain action (such as a purchase) taking place as a result of it.

Want to See More?

Fox News had a segment today about Emsense, and I thought you might enjoy watching this short clip: