INTRODUCTIONIts easy for businesses to keep track of what we buy, but harder to figure out why. Enter a nascent field called neuromarketing, which uses the tools of neuroscience to determine why we prefer some products over others. People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much they will pay for an item, says Uma R. Karmarkar, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who sports PhDs in both marketing and neuroscience. But they arent very good at accessing where that value comes from, or how and when it is influenced by factors like store displays or brands. Neuroscience can help us understand those hidden elements of the decision process. Neuromarketing is the tool which helps inunlocking the mysteries of consumer choice.Neuromarketing is an emerging field that bridges the study of consumer behaviour with neuroscience. Controversial when it first emerged in 2002, thefield is gaining rapid credibilityandadoptionamongadvertisingandmarketingprofessionals.Eachyear,over400billiondollarsisinvestedinadvertisingcampaigns.Yet,conventionalmethodsfortesting and predicting the effectiveness of those investments have generallyfailedbecausethey dependonconsumers willingness and competency to describe how they feel when they are exposed to an advertisement. Therefore, many major corporations have begun to take special interest in understanding how the human brain can help them better understand consumers. Neuro marketing offers cuttingedge methods or directly probing mindswithoutrequiringdemandingcognitiveorconsciousparticipation History of NeuromarketingThecombinationofneuro and marketingimpliesthe merging of two fields of study (neuroscience and marketing).The term neuromarketingcannot beattributed to a particular individual as it started appearing somewhat organically around 2002. At the time, a few U.S companies like Brighthouse and SalesBrain became the first to offerneuromarketing research and consulting services advocat-ing the use of technology and knowledge coming from the field of cognitive neuroscience. Basically neuromarketingistomarketingwhatneuropsychologyistopsychology.While neuropsychology studiestherelationshipbetween the brainand humancognitiveand psychological functions, neuromarketing promotes the value of looking at consumerbehaviorfromabrainperspective.The first scholarly piece of neuromarketing research wasperformedby ReadMontague, Professorof Neuroscience atBaylorCollegeofMedicinein2003andpublishedin Neuron in 2004.In a blind-taste test, consumers are asked to choose between Pepsi and Coca-Colaand to no ones surprise, Pepsi wins. However, a decade ago, neuroscientist Read Montague posed a question: If people truly prefer Pepsi over Coke, why isnt Pepsi dominating the market?Montague created a Pepsi Challenge of his own, hooking up his test subjects to an MRI machine to track brain activity. At first, about half of the participants said they preferred Pepsi; however, when Montague told them which samples were Coca-Cola, preferences shifted to three-to-one in favor of Coke. Additionally, he observed heightened activity had in the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that controls higher thinking; as well as in the hippocampus, which relates to memory.Montague concluded that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and that the thoughts and emotions connected to the branding were overriding reactions to the actual quality of the product. In 2004, he published his findingsand as a result, neuromarketing emerged from the shadows and into the public eye.For what kinds of customers is neuromarketing effective?Neuromarketing is a flexible method to determine customer preferences and brand loyalty, because it can apply to nearly anyone who has developed an opinion about a product or company. No matter what form it takes, marketing focuses on creating positive and memorable impact in the minds of customers. Neuromarketing measures those impacts, but anyone can take the basic discoveries and adjust their product or sevice to reflect subconscious consumer needs.Sensory devices that create or evoke memories, for example, can be easily employedthe aroma of fresh bread, recollections of past stories (either a published work or a shared experience), evocative language, a song that gets stuck in your head and wont come out -- ultimately, these are all effective (if crude) examples of neuromarketing that can be used by nearly any business of any size.