So what does this all add up to?

In the worlds of research and marketing, brain science gives us valuable instruments for thinking about the research process. It won't provide the answers on a plate because the answers don't exist. Just as our jobs are about interrogating and interpreting findings, we must apply the same rigorous analysis to these scientific developments and find the notions that can be tapped into across our familiar processes, from recruitment to interpretation. Many ideas and questions arise even from the handful of 'NeuroFacts' I have outlined here:

• Can the brand engram be used to understand and leverage all of a brand's associations? Should it replace pyramid or onion diagrams? Does it offer different 'ways in' to think about a brand?

• Hardwiring - understanding a brand's hardwiring allows one to understand realistically which associations are here to stay, which can be evolved and which can be changed.

• Emotional anchoring - can this be used as a tool for recruitment? Or segmentation? Or analysing data from different audience segments?

• Low attention processing - how can we find the answers to our questions using implicit techniques rather than explicit ones that rely on conscious awareness? Should we think about the different media in terms of their ability to communicate either explicitly or implicitly?

And so on...

It's also true that brain science gives us a way of talking convincingly and 'rationally' about emotions to our clients. Where necessary it has the credibility to stand up in the board room and shows that emotion can be scientifically proven, helping underpin the qualitative cause. Thinking of neuroscience in this way takes us beyond traditional ways of thinking - and is certainly far more useful than worrying about the outputs from an fMRI scan.
 

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