CONFERENCE FEATURE: Here Comes the Science Bit... Concentrate

At this year's MRS Conference, a final session and a Keynote speaker left Features Editor Teresa Lynch scratching her head and (therefore?) thinking of L'Oreal.

The by-now-obligatory neuromarketing session was this year in the afternoon on the second day. However the word of mouth and pre-publicity for David Penn's 'Neuromania, the new irrationalism, and why we need to rehumanise research' was sufficient to drag delegates who had been sunning themselves with the smokers on an East End pavement back into the dark and over air-conned interior. They were not disappointed; all three papers were well presented and informative.

First up was Cristina de Balanzό Bono of TNS with some mixed methodology case studies which involved using EEG, GSR and eye-tracking followed by focus groups. For her this combination addressed, among other things, the sense among clients that neuromarketing was a small academic pursuit which they didn't understand, which frequently over-promised and which could seem like a 'black box' solution. De Balanzό Bono said that the combined approach allowed the researcher to enrich the consumer feedback from any one source. She also showed the neuroscientific traces collected while consumers were watching the advert for McCoy's crisps where the guy in the pub has to admit he knows what a plié is and is immediately displaced by an evacuation tube. The main learning from this study was that the viewers were most aroused (?) by the pack shot, a finding corroborated by the focus groups.

John Robson of Sparkler, describing a study on behalf of Tui, started with a conundrum: when giving the reasons they go on holiday the same people who want to 'eat a full English breakfast' also want to 'try new foods' and the same people who want to 'go somewhere tried and tested' also want to 'try new places'. In order to explore this the team used a combination of qual, online quant, desk research and neuroscience to understand what made people apparently feel they had to sound more adventurous to researchers than they actually were. Findings showed that lots of people liked to do things they always do in places that they know. A question from the floor on this one was 'would it be possible to use these findings in a holiday ad?' The answer was no.

Both of the first two speakers were using neuroscience as a benchmarking tool or part of a series of tools, so when David Penn of Conquest started querying the validity of neuroscience techniques he made a point of not including in his criticism his colleagues on the stage. He did however not shirk from naming neuroscientific names, particularly Martin Lindstrom author of buy.ology and Dr A K Pradeep, author of The Buying Brain. According to Penn these authors take the concept that 'we can explain all our behaviour by reference to the brain' too far. He went on to illustrate this with his 'Seven Fallacies of Neuroscience' - details of which can be found online. Penn recommends that rather than electrodes we should be working with non-linguistic signs and metaphors to access deep responses to brands in our respondents.

Or as the final Keynote Speaker might say 'why not try numbers?' Marcus Du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics Professor at Oxford University survived having his name mispronounced and being told by Cambridge alumnus, MRS CEO Jane Frost that he went to the wrong university to bounce cheerfully onto the stage - and explained to us why we need to look for patterns in numbers.

First of all he showed us a film clip to illustrate that most mathematicians eventually go mad - then we played a lottery game and du Sautoy explained how unlikely any of us were ever to win. Apparently if a cave man had been playing the lottery once a week since the Stone Age his entries would just about have reached a critical mass in 2012 to make it likely that he might win. We also played a game of name the next number in the series, where the majority of the audience recognized a series of triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence and the first 6 prime numbers but we all ground to a halt trying to find the pattern in 6 numbers which turned out to be the winning lottery numbers from 28th September last year. Du Sautoy talked vivaciously about Chaos theory, fractals, Mandelbrot sets, butterflies and the connections between prime numbers and animal populations. He even illustrated the animal population bit with a game of musical chairs. Researchers seem to be very good at musical chairs. He concluded with the not very startling advice that we should always look for patterns in the numbers, but that sometimes the patterns would not be there. In short, it was highly entertaining, it was pretty informative, it wasn't market research but it was fun and that was what we were there. Because it was the final session; because we had (mostly) stayed awake for the whole two days; and after all, 'because we're worth it'.



That wraps up our coverage of the 2012 MRS Conference - we hope you've enjoyed Teresa's and Mel's write-ups. If you think you've missed any, see the following:

Researching Society - public sector researchers discussing the ever-growing policy challenges with which research can help. Endangered species? News Editor Mel Crowther thinks not.

The Doughnut of Excitement - ... and 'the Oompa Loompa of Ethnography'? Features Editor Teresa Lynch on a strange and wonderful Tuesday afternoon dreaming of a jargon-free industry and dabbling in ethnography.

Forward-Looking Statements - a first day focus on predicting the future - the Keynote address, the workshops and the papers teemed with it and with new words describing it, reports Features Editor Teresa Lynch.