Marketing Actions Can Modulate the Neural Representation of Experienced Pleasantness

This paper was presented at Consumer Neuroscience Colloquium, Sorbonne University and Southern Brittany University, held October 10th in Paris, France
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Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. The authors propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. The authors tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. The results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.