About ten years ago, I met an academic who specialised in the application of neuroscience in marketing and, more specifically, advertising. He was using sophisticated technology to track the effects of advertising stimuli on the brain by monitoring the areas of the brain that were activated. I considered this to be very clever and very […]

About ten years ago, I met an academic who specialised in the application of neuroscience in marketing and, more specifically, advertising. He was using sophisticated technology to track the effects of advertising stimuli on the brain by monitoring the areas of the brain that were activated. I considered this to be very clever and very useful science, so I asked him who his clients were. He responded by showing me a wall of logos – each logo representing a client. They included Coke, AT&T and many other large corporations in the United States. Given the academic was domiciled at a university in Western Australia, I enquired about his local clients. To my surprise, he replied, ‘I will not work with businesses in Western Australia’. I asked if he meant ‘will not’ or ‘does not’ work with businesses based in Western Australia, to which he responded, ‘will not’. Not surprisingly, I felt…