What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to marketing. This may include market research that seeks to uncover customer needs, motivations and preferences that cannot be uncovered through traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups.
Neuromarketing involves evaluating specific advertising, marketing, packaging, content, etc. to better understand how customers are responding on a subconscious level. It also includes applying insights from neuroscience and cognitive science research to make marketing more effective without testing other materials. “Consumer neuroscience” is sometimes used as a synonym for neuromarketing
What is Neuromarketing used for?
Neuromarketing is used in many different ways. In 2007, a team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and MIT's Sloan School of Management used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand what people's brains are doing when making purchasing decisions. I investigated whether By using brain imaging to observe which neural circuits light up or dim during the buying process, researchers have found that they can predict whether a person will purchase a product. The results of neuromarketing research are astonishing. In his 2008 book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, Martin Lindstrom chronicled his three-year investigation that began in 2004 and included the following findings:
Warning labels on cigarette packs stimulate neural activity in areas of the brain associated with cravings.
Images of dominant brands like the iPod stimulated the same parts of the brain that religious symbols activate.
A photo of Mini-His Cooper activated the part of the brain that responds to faces.
Some of the ways neuromarketing is used include:
product design testing;
user experience testing;
His A/B test to compare the performance of similar ads.
Optimize calls to action such as 'Visit our website'.
evaluation of the neural effect of images in advertising; and
rebranding campaign.
Neuromarketing research is expensive for companies because neurotechnology is expensive and specialized. In many cases, we hire a neuromarketing consulting firm to conduct this specialized research.
Benefits of Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing has many benefits, including:
1. Detailed insight: Neuromarketing looks more closely at human behavior than traditional market research, which uses techniques such as surveys and focus groups to assess consumer behavior at a higher level. Neuromarketing strategies take a closer look at consumer behavior, preferences and tendencies. They use otherwise unquantifiable data to determine how their customers are feeling or how they would react. Neuromarketing can also provide instant insight into customer behavior. honest feedback. These methods produce more reliable data because customers cannot lie in a neuromarketing context. You can change someone's mind just by asking them how they feel about something. Neuromarketing circumvents this problem and produces objective results that traditional customer satisfaction surveys cannot provide.
2. Subconscious revelation: This approach can provide insight into the subconscious simple answers that people generally don't remember.
3. Cost efficient: Neuromarketing can drive down prices and add value to market research.
4. Holistic strategy: Neuromarketing is combined with traditional methods for a more holistic approach to market research.
Criticism of neuromarketing
A neuromarketing critic has warned of a variety of dangers, including three of which he follows.
Manipulative. Anti-marketing activists like Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right to Know, that neuromarketing can exploit consumer fears to manipulate them or promote specific neural responses to stimuli. WARNING. Marketers claim that such precise manipulation is impossible or undesirable. According to BrightHouse, an Atlanta consulting firm, neuromarketers want to understand how and why customers engage with products, brands, and companies. pseudoscience. Neuromarketing is often equated with pseudoscience and hype, unsupported by credible neuroscientific claims. We dismissed it as a ploy to gain insight into consumer opinion.
No new information. Critics accuse neuromarketing of using science to explain in more complex ways what might be inferred by intuition. They say it just confirms what marketers already know about consumers.
Neuro Marketing Tools
"Neuromarketing" refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customer motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can aid in creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other areas of marketing. Brain scans, which measure neural activity, and physiological tracking, which measures eye movement and other proxies for that activity, are the most common methods of measurement.
The two primary brain scanning tools are fMRI and EEG. The first (functional magnetic resonance imaging) uses strong magnetic fields to monitor changes in blood flow to the brain and is performed while a person lies inside a machine that takes continuous measurements over time. An EEG (electroencephalogram) reads the activity of brain cells using sensors placed on the subject's scalp; it can track changes in activity in fractions of a second, but it does a poor job of pinpointing where the activity is occurring or measuring deep subcortical areas of the brain (where a lot of the interesting activity happens). FMRI can look deep into the brain, but it is cumbersome and only tracks activity over the course of a few seconds, which can miss fleeting neural incidents. (In addition, fMRI machines are many times more expensive than EEG machines, typically costing about $5 million with high overhead versus about $20,000.)
Instruments for measuring physiological proxies for brain activity tend to be more affordable and easier to use. Eye tracking can measure attention (via eye fixation points) and arousal (via pupil dilation); facial expression coding (reading minute facial muscle movement) can measure emotional responses; and heart rate, breathing rate, and skin conductance measure arousal.
Interest in consumer neuroscience ignited in the mid-2000s, when business school researchers began to show that advertising, branding and other marketing tactics could have a measurable impact on the brain. In 2004, researchers at Emory University administered Coca-Cola and Pepsi to subjects in an fMRI machine. When the drinks were not identified, the researchers noted a consistent neural response. However, when subjects saw the brand, their limbic structures (areas of the brain associated with emotions, memories and unconscious processing) showed increased activity, proving that familiarity with the brand changed how the brain perceived the drink. Four years later, a team led by Hilke Plassmann of INSEAD scanned the brains of test subjects as they tasted three wines of different prices; their brains registered the wines differently, with neural signatures indicating a preference for the most expensive wine. In fact, all three wines were the same. In another academic study, fMRI revealed that when consumers see a price, it can change their mental calculation of value: When the price was shown before exposure to the product, the neural data differed from that when it was shown after exposure, suggesting two different mental calculations: “ Is this product worth the price?” when price came first and “Do I like this product?” when product came first.
One of the biggest critiques neuromarketing faces is that it doesn’t offer new information. “Do marketers really need to be told that people’s brains react differently to Coke and Pepsi to understand the importance of branding?” summarizes Eben Harrell in the Harvard Business Review. Many marketers even think their intuition is enough to assess whether an advertisement is effective. Regardless of the fact that successful marketing is often counterintuitive, this is still a reductive way to view the field. Neuromarketing at the highest level isn’t a one-to-one comparison of better or worse. Thanks to new advancements in technology like SST, neuromarketing goes far beyond simple validation. Neuromarketers today, for instance, can even measure stimuli in context to tell brands if their advertisement will work better on YouTube or Twitch.
Most importantly, All of this can be linked to revenue. Among Neuro-Insight clientele, higher memory encoding at key branding has an 86% correlation to an increase in sales. And those who use neuromarketing are starting to see the value. The Association of National Advertisers reports that brands that use neuromarketing attribute it to an average 16.3% increase in revenue. Neuromarketing is the only form of consumer research that can accurately predict purchase intent.
What Is Neuromarketing’s Future?
Overall, neuromarketing is still a nascent industry. Many of the companies working in the space are a step behind the curve, which makes it hard for industry leaders to establish legitimacy. As the field progresses and technology evolves, neuromarketers will continue to demonstrate their ability to impact marketing efforts in unprecedented ways and generate a higher ROI than any other form of market research. Until the rest of the world catches up, it’s up to marketers to determine which neuromarketing companies are worth the investment.
Neuromarketing Case Study
There is an abundance of examples of neuromarketing as the technological innovation community continues its dynamic research in neuroscience applications. A 2012 study conducted at Emory University found that brain activity in participants significantly correlated with the future success of certain songs, as measured by sales three years later; however, when asked how they felt about the same songs, participants’ responses did not match their brain activity and did not predict sales. The electrical activity measured by fMRI was determined to be a more accurate indicator of actual feelings toward the future success of songs.
Ethics in Neuromarketing
While the goal of neuromarketing is to determine how consumers react to brands or campaigns, a seemingly innocuous study, not everyone believes it is ethical.
The research, "Is Neuromarketing an Ethical Practice? Yes, consumers say. "Consumers Say No" addresses ethical concerns such as "Will brands have too much influence over buyer decisions?"" as well as "Is neuromarketing manipulative?"
Neuromarketing is not inherently unethical. However, when researching their customers, businesses must adhere to a high ethical standard.
Brands, for example, should not intentionally promote anything harmful, deceptive, or illegal. Furthermore, you should not study minors to figure out how to sell a product to them.
Neuromarketing should be used to create effective advertisements and to eliminate advertisements that simply do not work. The main ethical concerns are about your product or service, rather than how you market it. If you're ever in doubt, consider whether the product or service is beneficial to the customer.
In reality, neuromarketing has already infiltrated the content space. Neurotrackers are used by Netflix, Hulu, and some television networks to predict the success of their shows, with an 84% accuracy rate, and this methodology may soon seep into the marketing industry.
Companies that Use Neuromarketing
It's worth noting that some of these companies experimented with neuromarketing as long ago as 2009. However, because neuroscience advances slowly, there are still useful and relevant lessons to be learned from each of these examples.
1. Microsoft Inc.
Microsoft wanted to see how effective its campaigns were on the Xbox platform — specifically, how Microsoft's 30-second and 60-second TV ads performed in comparison to in-game ad runs on Xbox.
Microsoft collaborated with neuromarketing firms Media brands and EmSense to conduct this study, which involved fitting test subjects with a headband that could track brain activity, breathing rate, head motion, heart rate, blink rate, and skin temperature.
The company then showed test subjects three different types of ads: a 30-second Kia Soul TV ad, a 60-second Kia Soul TV ad, and a Kia Soul in-game ad.
What were the outcomes? The first half of the TV commercials elicited the most brain activity. The Xbox Live advertisements, on the other hand, elicited peak brain activity at the repeat image of the Kia Soul car, implying that viewers will remember the ad better on Xbox.
More traditional metrics supported these findings; for example, the Xbox live ad delivered a 90% unaided brand recall rate, compared to 78% for the traditional TV spot.
2. Frito-Lay
In 2009, Frito-Lay collaborated with the advertising agency Juniper Park to create a campaign that would appeal more to women. Juniper Park used neuromarketing to study women's brains and discovered that the hippocampus — a memory and emotional center — is larger in women, implying that women may look for ad characters with whom they can empathies more.
According to Juniper Park's findings, women may have a stronger link between decision-making and feelings of guilt. Juniper Park began testing various ads to see how women responded after exploring this research with NeuroFocus.
Finally, the advertising agency recognized that women frequently feel guilty about their eating habits.
As a result, instead of attempting to eliminate this guilt, Frito-Lay should highlight its healthy ingredients in its snacks, and showcase spices or dressing on the packaging to demonstrate the health quality to avoid the guilt entirely.
3. The Shelter Pet Initiative
Nielson Consumer Neuroscience collaborated with the Ad Council and The Shelter Pet Project to assess consumers' unconscious reactions to the "Meet A Shelter Pet" advertisement. The team used EEG and eye-tracking measurements to compare the effectiveness of the Shelter's advertisements.
The findings showed that having faces on-screen, including a dog's, increased viewers' emotional engagement, while having the dog off-screen decreased attention.
To address these concerns and increase viewership and engagement, the team cut the dog's off-screen time and cleaned up the ending.
As a result of neuromarketing, the Shelter Pet project saw a 133% increase in website visits and a 28% increase in pet finder database searches.
4. Financial Institution in Germany
In 2017, a German financial institution collaborated with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience to determine which version of their advertisement elicited the most trust. To accomplish this, the team used EEG measurements to determine how emotionally engaged viewers were while watching two versions of an advertisement.
The only distinction? One advertisement played classical music, while the other played more contemporary notes. The participants were then asked to complete a task to determine how well the advertisement communicated messages on an unconscious level. The results showed that traditional music outperformed the more modern version and instilled "trust" in viewers. Classical instruments are likely associated with a sense of stability, whereas modern music evokes a sense of excitement and risk.
Conclusion
Even though we live in a data-driven age where almost anything can be measured, Google Analytics will never be able to accurately assess the most important aspect of your marketing campaign: its ability to make your audience feel something.
Fortunately, the neuromarketing space is rapidly evolving, and its technology is becoming more affordable and practical for marketers today, paving the way for its widespread adoption in the future. We should now stop and think about how much the value and perception of a Brand, determines our purchase decisions.
If we understand that, as humans, we are irrational; and that emotions, experiences and perceptions have a more dominant role than rational material utility during the purchase process, then we will notice the power of marketing, branding and advertising in conditioning our decisions and so our surrounding reality.
We need to be conscious of the thousands of stimuli that are hitting us in the everyday life. Being aware that we are inevitably conditioned by our surroundings it makes us more perceptive of our brain’s actions-reactions mechanisms.
In a world governed by advertising when you don’t buy the product you inevitably become the product!
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