Are Consumers Smart Enough to Tell the DIfference Between an Object and a Person?

Thanks to MIT Advertising Lab for pointing to a provocative piece in the current issue of Seed Magazine. Turns out that Harvard and U Michigan have poured a vat full of cold Gatorade on the conventional wisdom that brands have personalities just like people…
“During the study—the first ever to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),to examine how different regions of the brain are affected when thinking about certain qualities of brands—20 subjects were asked if 450 adjectives, like “down-to-earth,” “sophisticated” or “warm-hearted,” were applicable to themselves and other people. Then they were asked if those same human-like qualities could be judgments about brands they know and use.
The research team found that while the same words were being used to describe people and products, different regions of the brain were activated when subjects were talking about one or the other. The fMRI scans detected that there was a greater neural response in the medial prefrontal cortex regions of the brain when applying the adjectives to people. But when focusing on brands, like Wal-Mart, Starbucks or Ben & Jerry’s, the left inferior prefrontal cortex was activated, an area of the brain known to be involved in object processing."
Surprise, suprise: consumers are smart enough to think of things they buy as objects – or, to use an archaic term: products.
http://being-reasonable.com/index.php/weblog/C26/