Well, hello new life goal!

So I've always heard of people having these life epiphanies where they randomly decide to sign up for a class and voila! they love it and end up spending the next 10-50 years of their life (depending on how much they save for retirement and how much the economy managed to screw up during those years) working with, say, baby turtles in the Gulf of Mexico.

I've always been somewhat skeptical that something like this can actually happen. I always thought that this "epiphany" occurred conveniently at the end of second year when they were forced to choose their major. I'm sure many the "revelation" has been had in those final weeks of "what am I going to do with the rest of my life and why do I have to decide this at age twenty?"

Then it happened to me. But not in the way I was expecting. It was far from the moment I had envisioned: the heavens opening up, bright light shining down on me, and a deep voice saying "you have found your passion, now go, build plumbing in third world countries!"

It more just happened from me, for the first time in my life, trying to be a keener.

Side note: for my fellow Americans who have never heard the term keener (my new favorite Canadian word), Urban Dictionary defines it as follows: Individual eager to demonstrate knowledge or participate enthusiastically in school, church, seminars, etc. Like nerd,geek, brown-noser, smartypants, etc. but with more emphasis on willingness and enthusiasm, and less on social inadequacy, sycophancy, or natural ability.

Anyway, during my marketing class, my professor showed a slide with a picture of a book called Buyology. It really had nothing to do with whatever topic was on the slide at the time, but as a side note she mentioned that, if you had time, you should definitely pick up a copy of this book.

Lo and behold, the next week I found myself in front of Chapters with a crisp paycheck in my hand, so I decided to swing in and spend a good portion of my savings to buy this little, bright yellow paperback book. As I saw my bus pulling in across the street, I didn't even bother reading the back, just threw money at the cashier and did the common student mini-marathon across the street to leap on the bus. I then completely forgot about the book for the next few days.

Until, one day, I was on stumbleupon. com (for those of you who don't know, stumble upon is defined on Urban Dictionary as "The most addicting website ever." Pretty much all you need to know). I was on page 457, 394 of the day, and one of those "get the f*** off stumbleupon and read instead" pages came up. So, following this wise advice, I pulled out Buyology and cracked open the cover, not expecting to be entertained and guessing my return to stumbleupon was imminent.

Buyology is good.

Really, really good.

Basically epiphany-causing good.

For those of you who haven't heard of it, Martin Lindstrom, the author, embarks on this three-year long study investigating neuromarketing. Basically, his idea is that traditional marketing research, with the participants filling in surveys and answering interview questions about their reactions to certain products, are inaccurate. As humans, we have the total inability to interpret and successfully report our brain's true reactions to stimuli. Instead, we take the original thought and manipulate it to reflect what we think the audience and ourselves want to hear and report those findings, which are often inaccurate, albeit with a grain of truth. So Lindstrom decides to go right to the source and measure brain activity using mainly fMRIs to ssee how consumers truly react when they see a product. In these studies, he address the power of subliminal messaging (more powerful than we can ever imagine), sex in ads (less effective that its prevailence implies), product placement (often scarily effective if done right), the power of logos (so much less important than expected, and far from the end-all-be-all traditional marketing makes it out to be) and countless other advertising techniques. His results are nothing short of mindblowing.

And I found a new passion. I've known for a while that I want to study marketing with a minor in psychology because the two go hand-in-hand. But this idea of neuromarketing connects the two at such a deeper level. And the field is growing quickly. After Buyology made the New York Times Bestseller list, several huge companies, including Coke and Johnson and Johnson, started using neuromarketing to research the efficacy of their new campaigns.

As with every revolutionary new technique, it is not without controversy. Thousands of citizens complained that the new techniques are far too evasive to be considered moral, and many fear it could be used to manipulate consumers to make purchases that they never wanted to in the first place.

Not that I'm biased about this issue or anything, as hopefully it is going to be my future career, but isn't that the point of marketing in the first place?