The opening of “Is Your Coffee Too Cheap?” a Spiegel article by Frank Thadeusz about “neuro pricing,” in which consumer brainwaves are studied to determine what the market will bear:

“The most subversive criticism of capitalism at the moment comes from the small town of Aspach, in the Swabian-Franconian Forest, a region of southern Germany known for its industrious and energetic inhabitants. Kai-Markus Müller is sitting in his office in a nondescript building, thinking about the coffee-roasting company Starbucks. ‘Everyone thinks that they’ve truly figured out how to sell a relatively inexpensive product for a lot of money,’ he says. ‘But the odd thing is that even this company doesn’t understand it.’

Müller, a neurobiologist, isn’t criticizing working conditions at the multinational purveyor of hot beverages. Instead, what he means is that the Seattle-based company gives away millions of dollars a year out of pure ignorance. The reason? Starbucks isn’t charging enough for its coffee.

It’s an almost obscene observation. Müller is convinced that customers would in fact be willing to dig even more deeply into their pockets for products for which Starbucks already charges upmarket prices.

Classic Market Research Doesn’t Work Correctly

The brain researcher is also a sales professional. Müller used to work for Simon, Kucher and Partners, a leading international consulting firm that helps companies find suitable prices for their products. But he soon lost interest in the job when he recognized that ‘classic market research doesn’t work correctly.’ From the scientist’s perspective, research subjects have only limited credibility when they are asked to honestly state how much money they would spend for a product.

Instead, Müller is searching for ‘neuronal mechanisms,’ deeply buried in the human brain, ‘that we can’t just deliberately switch off.'”