Question 1- Picture yourself with wires hooked up to your head or entering a magnetic tube that can see inside your brain. You must be undergoing some medical test, right? Think again-its marketing Research! Marketing research is becoming more like science fiction with a new field called neuromarketing, which uses technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to peer into consumers' brains in an attempt to understand cognitive and affective responses to marketing stimuli. One company, Thinkingcraft, uses a methodology called "neurographix" to help marketers develop messages that fit the way customers think. The Omnicon advertising agency uses "neuroplanning" to determine the appropriate media mix for a client. One study found that consumers preferred Pepsi.over Coke in blind taste tests but preferred Coke when they could see the names of the brands tasted. Different areas of the brain were activated when they knew the brand compared to when they did not, suggesting that what marketers make us believe is more persuasive than what our own taste buds tell us.
a. Learn more about neuromarketing and discuss another example of its application.
b. Critics have raised concerns over the usefulness and ethics of this type of marketing research. Discuss both sides of the debate surrounding this methodology.
Question 2- Marketing information helps develop insights into the needs of customers, and gathering competitive intelligence (CI) data supplies part of this information. CI has blossomed into a full-fledged industry, with most major companies establishing CI units. But not all CI gathering is ethical or legal-even at venerable P&G. In 1943, a P&G employee bribed a Lever Brothers (now Unilever) employee to obtain bars of Swan soap, which was then under development, to improve its Ivory brand. P&G settled the case by paying Unilever almost $6 million (about $60 million in today's dollars) for patent infringement-a small price to pay given the market success of Ivory. In 2001, P&G once again paid a $10 million settlement to Unilever for a case that involved a contractor rummaging through a trash dumpster outside Unilever's office, an infraction that was actually reported by P&G itself. More recently, the U.S. Attorney General's office halted a corporate espionage lawsuit between Starwood Hotels and Hilton Hotels because it is already pursuing criminal charges against Hilton and two executives it hired away from Starwood. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that employees commit 75 percent of intellectual property theft. The threat is not just internal, though. The FBI is tracking approximately 20 countries actively spying on U.S. companies.
a. Find another example of corporate espionage and write a report on it. Did the guilty party pay restitution or serve prison time? Discuss what punishments, if any, should be levied in cases of corporate espionage.
b. How can businesses protect themselves from corporate espionage?