Hilke Plassmann
Hilke Plassmann is Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, where her research uses brain imaging to test how commercial cues change subjective experience. Her best-known study put identical wine at different stated prices in front of subjects inside an fMRI scanner: the higher price raised both how pleasant people said the wine tasted and measurable activity in a brain region linked to experienced pleasantness. It is one of the more rigorous pieces of evidence that price does not just change what people report, it changes what they appear to feel.
Who they are
Hilke Plassmann is Professor of Marketing, specialising in decision neuroscience, at INSEAD. Her work sits at the intersection of marketing and neuroscience, using brain imaging to ask whether commercial signals such as price or branding change a person's actual experience of a product, rather than only what they say about it afterwards.
Her most cited study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 with John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv and Antonio Rangel, gave subjects the same wine at different stated prices while scanning their brains. Subjects reported the more expensive-labelled wine as more pleasant, and their medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with experienced pleasantness, showed correspondingly higher activity. Because the wine itself never changed, the result suggests a price tag can alter the brain's registration of pleasure, not only a person's willingness to say something tasted good.
A follow-up study in Scientific Reports extended the same question to how contextual cues more broadly, not price alone, feed into the brain's valuation and affective-regulation systems and shape experienced taste pleasantness.
Her co-author on the 2008 paper, John O'Doherty, is a neuroscientist, and is a different person from Brian O'Doherty, the artist and critic known for his writing on gallery spaces who also appears elsewhere on this site. The two share a surname and nothing else; this page does not link one to the other.
Plassmann has not published a book. Her scholarly output runs through peer-reviewed journal articles, and her standing in the field rests on the falsifiability of that work, results other researchers can and do attempt to replicate, a different standard from most trade-press claims about "neuromarketing."
Key papers
Plassmann has published no books. Her output is journal articles.
Plassmann, H., O'Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008), "Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 1050-1054. The wine-price fMRI study: identical wine at different stated prices produced different reported pleasantness and different medial orbitofrontal cortex activity.
Plassmann, H., et al. (2017), "How context alters value: The brain's valuation and affective regulation system link price cues to experienced taste pleasantness," Scientific Reports. Extends the price-cue finding to a broader account of how context feeds into the brain's valuation system.
Key ideas
Commercial cues such as price can change the brain's registered pleasantness of a product, not only what people say about it afterwards.
The wine-pricing effect showed up both in subjective report and in medial orbitofrontal cortex activity, not report alone.
Her work is falsifiable and peer-reviewed, a different standard of evidence from most "neuromarketing" claims.
Her co-author John O'Doherty, a neuroscientist, is not related to Brian O'Doherty, the art critic, despite the shared surname.
Concepts on this site
the context effect, her fMRI study is the central empirical case for this concept
framing, price framed identical wine into a different reported and measured experience
Find them elsewhere
The X account links straight to her INSEAD faculty profile, and the Scholar profile states her INSEAD chair with the 2008 PNAS wine study as its top publication. No Bluesky account was found and no LinkedIn profile could be confirmed to the required standard
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Plassmann, H., O'Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008), "Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 1050-1054.
- Plassmann, H., et al. (2017), "How context alters value: The brain's valuation and affective regulation system link price cues to experienced taste pleasantness," Scientific Reports.