Neuromarketing: What lies beyond the hype?

Neuromarketing is once again making some (discrete) headlines. This time, it's a study purporting to show that eating chocolate is more pleasurable than many things (but less than finding money). The problems with such studies have already been discussed at length elsewhere but there is a small detail that is often overlooked: Even if you take all the claims at face value and forget for a minute that it's absurd to inform people about what they really enjoy (and, believe my scientific opinion, you are having a lot of fun right now even if you don't actually feel it), these studies always compare widely different activities (one of which is usually eating chocolate, for some reason).

The question is: How is that interesting to anybody? It won't tell you if that chocolate is better than any other and it certainly won't help you create a better or more successful chocolate. You might try to generate some hype around the notion that redecorating a room is more exciting than sex but I don't recall ever having to choose between them in my life and that won't really be useful to anybody selling anything else than paint. Once we have created a canonical list of pleasures and we all agree that redecorating and eating chocolate are really really fun, there is not much you can do about it apart from giving up your current business and start making wallpaper and chocolate (or, apparently, spreading money randomly on the streets but it's unclear how that could be profitable).

Interestingly, that's not entirely coincidental. In more rigorous neuroscience or psychophysiological research, the protocol usually involves showing a large number of pictures to a bunch of people only to find a small (but significant, hallelujah!) effect. And the pictures I am talking about are not different shades of paint or different chocolate bars, it's usually some pretty strong stuff like badly burned people and car accidents. What many people fail to realize is that physiological measures, while they can be fascinating, are usually extremely noisy and often require tedious repetitions and large(ish) samples to merely find any difference in the way people respond to anything. If we ever get beyond the hype, solve the huge inference problems and start conducting proper neuromarketing studies, there is still a long way to go from coarse differences between activities to useful comparisons between products in the same category or different versions of the same ad.