Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing communication field that applies neuropsychology to market research, studying consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.
Neuromarketing seeks to understand the rationale behind how consumers make purchasing decisions and their responses to marketing stimuli to apply those learnings in the marketing realm.
The potential benefits to marketers include more efficient and effective marketing campaigns and strategies, fewer product, and campaign failures, and ultimately the manipulation of the real needs and wants of people to suit the needs and wants of marketing interests.
Neuromarketing is very expensive as it requires advanced equipment, technology, and techniques such as:
ZMET – Zaltman metaphor elicitation:
Is used to explore the human subconscious where images and information is stored. This technique is used to activate hidden images or feelings in the brain which leads to positive emotional responses which could then lead to a person purchasing a product or service.
FMRI – Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Is used to understand how the brain reacts to certain messages, images and what reactions take place when a person is stimulated into buying a product. In short, this technique helps marketers understand why consumers buy.
EEG – Electroencephalography
This measures electrical activity in the brain which is associated with increased or reduced focus or excitement. For eg, how excited do consumers get when they are shown a certain product or service.
Motion capture for eye tracking
This records the movement and focus of the consumers eyes. For e.g., do consumers tend to pay more attention to ads that are shown in videos or images, what percentage of consumers did the ad on a street pole attract compared to an ad on a billboard.
Both the human conscious and subconscious play an important role in decision making, however your subconscious has a larger influence on the decisions that you make, this is because your subconscious stores information that is later brought up when faced with making certain decisions.
For e.g., if you were to learn CPR this information on how to and when to use it is stored in your subconscious and when faced with a situation when it is required, your subconscious brings forth this information for you to then use.
This is what Neuromarketing tries to understand and gain information from, knowing what consumers will do and how they will react to certain situations, images, scents, and other sensory functions.
Knowing this beforehand is extremely powerful as you are then able to manipulate consumers into purchases products and services using their subconsciousness by making them make unconscious decisions.
Let’s talk about colours in Neuromarketing, in my past blog post Marketing Psychology – Colour Marketing, I explained the different colours and what they mean.
Colours as you know plays an important part in marketing, as colours bring out certain emotions in consumers. Neuromarketing aims to understand the exact brain activity that takes place when a consumer is shown a certain colour, you may ask yourself well why do we need to know what activity takes place in the brain based on a colour if we already know the emotions that a certain colour brings out.
This is because different groups and different cultures react to colours differently, for example the colour black in some cultures could bring out the emotions of elegance while in others black could bring out a negative emotion such as mourning. Knowing exactly what emotion will be brought out when using a certain colour to attract a certain group of consumers gives marketers a competitive edge over their competitors.
Neuromarketing is also used with Big Data in understanding modern-day advertising channels such as social networking, search behaviour and website engagement patterns.
The ultimate goal of Neuromarketing is to help marketers engage with consumers at the subconscious level.
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