Neuromarketing’s “Stealth Mode”: How Brands Target Your Subconscious Without Disclosure

How a $1.7 billion industry is scanning brains to sell you things you never knew you wanted. And why is nobody stopping them?

Next time you’re in a grocery store, take a look at the chip aisle. Notice how some bags are shiny, and others are matte. Notice the colors. There’s a reason for all of it, and it has nothing to do with what’s inside the bag.

Back in 2009, Frito-Lay had a problem. Women were only reaching for salty snacks about 14% of the time. They preferred sweets or, worse from a chip company’s perspective, actual healthy food. So Frito-Lay did something that sounds like science fiction but was very much real: they started scanning women’s brains to figure out why.

According to reporting in the New York Times, Jill Nykoliation, president of Juniper Park (a division of ad giant BBDO), “began by researching how women’s brains compared with men’s, so the firm could adjust the marketing accordingly.”

What she found was the anterior cingulate cortex, a region linked to decision-making that’s larger in women. And crucially, it’s connected to feelings of guilt.

That guilt thing turned out to be the key. When they tested the original shiny yellow chip bags using EEG and biometrics, that guilt center lit up. The packaging itself was making women feel bad about themselves before they even opened the bag.

So Frito-Lay made a switch: matte beige bags with pictures of healthy ingredients. As their portfolio marketing VP, Gannon Jones explained, “She wants a reminder that she’s eating something better for herself.”

The results? Over 195 million positive impressions in six months. More women are buying chips. Record sales.

Now, here’s the part that keeps nagging at me. The women who participated in that brain research signed consent forms. They knew what they were getting into.

But the millions of women who later walked down grocery aisles and encountered those matte beige bags? They had no idea. No disclosure. No opt-out. Just packaging scientifically designed to slip past their conscious defenses.

That gap between the people in the lab and the people in the store is the story that doesn’t get told nearly enough.

A $1.7 Billion Industry Built on Your Subconscious

There’s a statistic that gets thrown around constantly in marketing circles. Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has claimed that “95 percent of our purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind.”

Whether that exact number holds up to scrutiny is debatable. But here’s what matters: the industry believes it. And they’re putting serious money behind that belief.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the global neuromarketing market hit $1.71 billion in 2025 and is on track to reach $2.62 billion by 2030. Some estimates put it even higher. Either way, we’re looking at a growth industry built entirely on one premise: decoding how you think so they can sell you things more effectively.

The logic isn’t hard to follow. “There is a very long history within psychology of people not being very good judges of what they will actually do in a future situation,” UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman told ScienceDaily. His research showed that brain scans predicted sunscreen use more accurately than what people said they’d do.

The marketing implication was obvious: why bother asking people what they want when you can just measure it directly?

The study that really kicked all this off came in 2004. Read Montague and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine put people in fMRI machines and gave them Coke and Pepsi.

In blind taste tests, Pepsi often won. But when people knew what they were drinking, something shifted. “Brand knowledge for one of the drinks,” the researchers wrote, “had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses.”

Dramatic. That’s the word they used. And that’s when marketing realized it could get inside your head, literally.

It’s Not Just Chip Companies

Once you start looking, you find this stuff everywhere. The companies using neuromarketing read like a Fortune 500 roll call.

Take Netflix. According to their own research, “images that have expressive facial emotion that conveys the tone of the title do particularly well” in getting people to click. So they started showing different thumbnail images to different users based on viewing history. “Perhaps we realize you’re into teenage or younger shows,” explained Tony Jebara, their former head of machine learning, “so it’s great for us to show you this image of two teenagers as the entry point.”

Think about that. Two people scrolling past the same show might see completely different faces looking back at them, each selected to maximize the chance they’ll click.

Or take PayPal. For years, the company pushed messaging around safety and security. Then they tested their commercials using EEG and discovered something unexpected: “the promise of convenience activated the brain more than security.” They pivoted their entire advertising strategy based on brain scan data.

Hyundai put EEG caps on people examining car prototypes and used the brain data to influence exterior design. Microsoft measured gamers’ neural responses to Xbox ads. Yahoo created a 60-second dancing commercial, tested it with EEG, found it lit up memory regions, and rolled it out as part of a $100 million campaign.

“For advertisers,” Lieberman noted, “there may be a lot more that is knowable than is known, and this is a data-driven method for knowing more about how to create persuasive messages.”

Small tweaks. Massive budgets. All based on measuring responses you can’t consciously articulate. Which raises a question that nobody in the industry seems particularly eager to answer.

Where’s the line between understanding consumers and manipulating them?

“Are We Treating People Like People?”

Not everyone is comfortable with where this is going.

James Garvey, philosopher and author of “The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants to Change Your Mind,” put it this way: “There is a question of human dignity here. Are we treating people like people with hopes and desires? Or are we treating them as things that we can manipulate based on our understanding of how brains work?”

The consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert, co-founded by Ralph Nader and Gary Ruskin, has been raising alarms since the early 2000s. In a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee, Ruskin asked a question that still doesn’t have a good answer: “What would happen in this country if corporate marketers and political consultants could literally peer inside our brains, and chart the neural activity that leads to our selections in the supermarket and voting booth?”

The industry pushes back, of course. Steven Quartz, a Caltech neuroscientist, has dismissed such concerns as “gross misunderstandings and distortions of both the power of brain imaging technology and its use in marketing.” Dr. Gemma Calvert of Neurosense argues that “the market is just trying to understand what consumers want so that it can give it to them.”

That sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a minute. The people in research studies consent to having their brains scanned. The rest of us, the ones who actually encounter the optimized ads and redesigned packaging, never do.

The People Who Can’t Protect Themselves

Here’s where this gets genuinely dark.

Consider gambling. Dr. Luke Clark at Cambridge studied how the brain responds to “near misses”—those moments when you almost win but don’t. The findings were disturbing: near-miss outcomes activated the same reward-processing brain regions as actual wins.

But it gets worse. “The parts of the brain involved in reward processing, the so-called dopamine centres, were more active in problem gamblers than in social gamblers.”

Clark spelled out the implication: “These findings are exciting because they suggest that near-misses may elicit a dopamine response in the more severe gamblers, although no actual reward is delivered. If these bursts of dopamine are driving addictive behaviour, this may help to explain why problem gamblers find it so difficult to quit.”

Slot machines are programmed to deliver near-misses at rates higher than random chance would produce. The industry knows this triggers reward responses. They know it hits addicts harder than casual players. And they keep doing it.

Then there’s the question of children.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles impulse control, judgment, and long-term thinking, doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. Meanwhile, the limbic system, which drives emotional responses, is already running at full speed.

As Harvard Business Review noted, “neurotesting could be used to target vulnerable populations, say, by trying to create ads that will induce more teenagers to vape.”

The same HBR piece acknowledged something telling: “Although consumers typically accept that their purchase behavior is public, they think of their brains and thoughts as private, which can lead to backlash against organizations that use neuromarketing tools.”

Backlash. That’s the fear. And yet, years later, no meaningful backlash has materialized. No regulations. No restrictions. Nothing.

The Regulators Are Nowhere

In the United States, there is essentially zero regulation of neuromarketing. The FTC has general authority over deceptive advertising, but they’ve never applied it to brain-scanning research. No disclosure requirements. No consent rules for the downstream consumers who encounter the optimized results. The industry operates in a complete vacuum.

France took a different approach. In 2011, France revised its bioethics law to say that brain-imaging techniques can only be used for medical research, scientific research, or legal proceedings. Commercial neuromarketing using fMRI? Effectively banned.

“The market is flourishing,” observed Olivier Oullier, professor of behavioral and brain sciences at Aix-Marseille University. “There are over 150 companies around the world dedicated to neuromarketing, involving tens of millions of dollars.”

But even France’s law has gaps. Eye-tracking and EEG remain legal. And companies that want fMRI data just cross the border to Belgium or the UK, run their studies there, and bring the findings home. The law is a speed bump, not a wall.

There are some recent glimmers of progress. Chile amended its constitution in 2021 to protect “neurorights.” California and Colorado passed neural data privacy laws in 2024. But these are early efforts, incomplete, untested, and easily outpaced by an industry that moves fast and has billions at stake.

“Our Brains Are Our Last Bastion of Freedom”

Nita Farahany has been trying to change the conversation. A professor of law and philosophy at Duke and author of “The Battle for Your Brain,” she served on Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and has spoken at the World Economic Forum, TED, and academic conferences worldwide.

Her argument centers on something she calls “cognitive liberty,” a right to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination over one’s own mind.

As she told the Harvard Gazette: “I think of our brains as our last bastion of freedom. In many other ways, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to keep data private.” “The biggest threat,” she’s said elsewhere, “is to what I call our cognitive liberty. Our right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences.”

And the problem extends well beyond marketing. Neural interface technology is advancing fast. Employers are already using brain-monitoring technology to track worker fatigue; five thousand companies worldwide are using SmartCap technologies for exactly that purpose. The same neuroscience that lets companies optimize chip bags could eventually enable far more intrusive kinds of surveillance.

“Commodification of brain data has already begun,” Farahany has warned. “Brain sensors are already being sold worldwide. It isn’t everybody who’s using them yet. When it becomes an everyday part of our everyday lives, that’s the moment at which you hope that the safeguards are already in place.”

The safeguards, for the most part, are not in place.

The “Buy Button” Defense Doesn’t Hold Up

When neuromarketing gets criticized, defenders have a go-to response: they mock the idea of a “buy button” in the brain.

And they’re right! There’s no single neural switch that makes you purchase things.

Roger Dooley, who runs the Neuromarketing blog, calls critics “neuro-alarmists” and dismisses fears as “ludicrous.” “One of the enduring fictions of neuromarketing,” he’s written, “is that there is a ‘buy button’ in the brain. Marketers salivate at the thought, and consumer groups fear it.”

Fair point. Human decision-making is messy and complex. No single button controls anything.

But this defense completely misses what’s actually happening.

The industry doesn’t need a button. What it has is arguably more powerful: the ability to identify and exploit dozens of subtle triggers, cognitive biases, and emotional vulnerabilities. Not one button, a whole constellation of pressure points.

Back in 2010, researchers Ariely and Berns warned that “the profit motive may incentivize companies to misuse neuromarketing, encouraging them to try to cross from persuasion to manipulation.” They specifically worried about what they called “stealth neuromarketing”—the kind that “tries to manipulate consumer behavior without their being aware of its influence.”

We’re not talking about some dystopian future here. We’re talking about chip bags and Netflix thumbnails and PayPal commercials. The mundane architecture of everyday life is quietly optimized to work on your brain without you noticing.

The Question We Should Be Asking

The neuromarketing industry insists they’re just understanding consumers better. And that’s partly true. Oullier himself has pointed out that the same techniques could be used to make anti-smoking campaigns more effective. The science isn’t inherently evil.

But the fundamental question keeps going unanswered. At what point does persuasion become manipulation? At what point does “understanding the consumer” cross over into “exploiting the consumer”? And this is the big one who gets to decide where that line is?

Right now, the industry decides for itself. And the answer they’ve landed on is: there is no line.

That woman who sat in a lab with electrodes on her head, she signed a consent form. She knew what she was participating in. The rest of us never signed anything. We never will, unless something fundamental changes.

I keep thinking about those matte beige chip bags. How many times have I walked past them without a second thought? How many times did the guilt center in my brain stay quiet because someone in a lab figured out exactly the right shade of beige to make that happen?

I didn’t consent to that. Neither did you.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe optimizing packaging based on brain scans is no different than optimizing it based on focus groups. Maybe the real problem isn’t the techniques themselves but the silence around them, the silence of lawmakers, regulators, and all of us who know this is happening and scroll past anyway.

Or maybe there’s something deeply wrong with a world where corporations understand your brain better than you do—and use that understanding to sell you things while you have no idea it’s happening.

I don’t have the answer. But the question matters. And we should be asking it a lot louder than we are.

Sources

1. Frito-Lay neuromarketing case study: https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/less-guilt-sells-more-chips.htm
2. Leo9 Studio Frito-Lay analysis: https://leo9studio.com/blog/neuromarketing-research-example/
3. Gerald Zaltman HBS interview: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it
4. McClure et al. Coke vs Pepsi study (Neuron): https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(04)00612-9
5. Mordor Intelligence market valuation: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/neuromarketing-market
6. Matthew Lieberman’s study (ScienceDaily): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100623110114.htm
7. Netflix personalization: https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/tools-technologies/articles/netflix-personalization-engine
8. iMotions neuromarketing examples (PayPal): https://imotions.com/blog/insights/research-insights/neuromarketing-examples/
9. James Garvey quote (Epoch Times): https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/neuromarketing-in-the-age-of-iphones-2228090
10. Commercial Alert history (Utne): https://www.utne.com/community/abravenewbranding/
11. Steven Quartz and industry responses: http://www.sandrablakeslee.com/articles/neuromarketing_oct04.php
12. Dr. Luke Clark’s gambling research (Cambridge): https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/near-misses-are-like-winning-to-problem-gamblers
13. Chase and Clark study (Journal of Neuroscience): https://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/18/6180
14. Harvard Business Review neuromarketing ethics: https://hbr.org/2019/01/when-neuromarketing-crosses-the-line
15. France bioethics law (Springer): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9581-5
16. Olivier Oullier interview: https://www.mysciencework.com/omniscience/neuromarketing-tools-for-neuro-public-health
17. Nita Farahany (Harvard Gazette): https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/04/we-should-be-fighting-for-our-cognitive-liberty-says-ethics-expert/
18. Nita Farahany (Duke CE): https://www.dukece.com/insights/a_penny_for_your_thoughts/
19. Roger Dooley on buy buttons: https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/buy-buttons-and-neuro-nudges.htm
20. Neuromarketing ethics (CXL): https://cxl.com/blog/neuromarketing-ethics/
21. European neurorights analysis: https://c4ep.eu/neurorights-in-europe-striking-a-balance-between-ethical-regulation-and-competitiveness/