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Consumers' preferences for commodity brands depend on cultural backgrounds, professions, sex, age and purchasing powers, a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging shows. Which one do you prefer, Pepsi or Coca-Cola? VAIO or Powerbook? Super Dry or Black Label (Japanese beers)? Asians or Super Mild (shampoos sold in Japan)? Consumers' preferences for commodity brands depend on cultural backgrounds, professions, sex, age and purchasing powers. Typically, when an individual prefers a particular brand, he/she cares less about other brands in the same category. Thus, the preference for a brand may be related to a consumer's positive emotional or experiential association with the brand, in contrast to his/her neutralism towards other brands.

In a study using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) targeting Japanese female college students, a relatively uniform population, neural mechanisms underlying their commodity preferences was investigated. A pre-scan screen revealed that among 560 brands chosen from ~100 categories, most of students preferred the same brand and were neutral to the remaining brands in each of 80 categories. We then prepared 80 preferred-neutral brand pairs and asked the students to either choose their preferred brand or the one judged visually striking from the pair while their brains were scanned.

The comparison between these two decision-making processes revealed elevated activity in a brain network known to be involved in modifying decision-making with positive emotions, evaluation of individual brands and memory processes, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, midbrain and parahippocampal gyrus. A similar brain network was also activated when these students performed the same two tasks on positive-neutral picture pairs. These results may lead to a better understanding of neural mechanisms underlying the consumer psychology as how consumers make decisions in choosing certain commodities over others.