Neuromarketing. The Future of Marketing

People don’t have an objective view of reality; they’re influenced by memories, sensory experiences and existing mental models.

Do you think you could pass blended dog food off as a fancy dish of duck pâté? Research suggests that you can, as long as you control the setting and visual elements of the food’s presentation. Beautiful food is often rated as being tastier than ugly food, even if the actual taste of the food is exactly the same. Likewise, a white wine will be mistaken for red wine by even the most experienced sommelier, as long as it’s dropped with red food coloring first. Part of this is because taste isn’t a human being’s strongest sense, but it also hints at the subjective nature of human experience, and the malleability of human perceptions of reality.

An experiment from the University of Colorado showed that even a seemingly unrelated sensory experience can influence human perception. Participants in the experiment rated faces as more attractive if they’d been offered a hot cup of coffee before making their designations. If the participants were offered a cold cup of coffee, their ratings tended to ...