Is neuromarketing dead?
“I’m going to throw myself under the bus,” said one researcher who's been doing fMRI studies for 15 years.
“This whole subbranch of fMRI could go extinct if we don’t address this critical limitation.”
He's worried because it seems that follow-up tests of bran scan subjects are often very poorly correlated with the original measures. Like, miserably correlated.
A big team led by Maxwell Elliott at Duke did a meta-analysis of 56 academic papers covering 90 fMRI experiments to reach this conclusion.
Does this mean all brain scan research is garbage?
No. There are studies that have shown reliability across test/retest fMRI measures. And other studies show the metrics are predictive of in-market marketing results — sometimes much more predictive than surveys or focus groups.
But this is a very good reminder to make sure that what you're measuring is giving you reliable data.