The emergent field of neuromarketing investigates consumers' impulses to marketing stimuli in the hope of discovering which part of the brain causes people to behave the way they do. The goal of this method of marketing is that producers will more effectively be able to create products that will appeal to specific parts of the human brain, thus optimizing efficiency in production.
Genomarketing takes neuromarketing one step further and branches off the assumption that we can potentially predict people's actions by assessing their genes. A study published this month in the SSRN working paper series has found that people who lack full expression of a certain gene (monoamine oxidase A) are far more likely to be in credit card debt than are people who express the gene normally. (The authors are Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a research associate formerly at Harvard Business School, and James Fowler, a long-time collaborator on social network research with Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis.)
Genomarketing would allow companies to use genomic data about individuals in the population to target their marketing strategies toward certain groups of people. With genomic sequencing technology rapidly advancing, it is reasonable to predict that some day in the future, each human will know his/her own genetic code. Undoubtedly this information could be released to particular industries, thus promoting further research on the isolation of individual genes to observe different behaviors.
Would genomarketing be ethical? Certainly not. Consider the possibilities: a credit card company looks at your genetic information, and discovers that you are part of a pool of members who are at high risk for developing fraudulent credit card practices. They target you differently with their marketing. A clothing company discovers that a certain gene puts you "at risk" for compulsively shopping more; they consequently send you many promotional coupons, hoping to lure you into their store. Clearly the possibilities are widespread, endless, and somewhat frightening. Scarier still is that genetic information can be obtained so easily - through fingerprinting, or through a single strand of the individual's hair, etc.
Undoubtedly there are still many, many years until genomarketing will become a viable possibility. At the moment, it would be far too expensive and would surely be deemed illegal. But the development of such a practice is almost certainly looming on the horizon. Especially with the rapid development of technology, it is reasonable to assume that genomarketing will become an inevitable part of our society some day in the (relatively near) future.
Tags: Decision-making, Genetics, Neuroeconomics
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