Every marketer ultimately aims to do the same thing: Improve their results as they spend less on advertising. Neuromarketing is a promising approach that can help marketers work towards this goal.
What Is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing enables a smarter kind of marketing that vastly improves the effectiveness of any marketing material, and it’s centerd around understanding how a customer’s brain works, and how various promotional activities will affect them.
How It Works
Basically, there are two methods that can be used to track a customer’s brain activity. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, with the names of each being functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).
The former utilizes a powerful magnet that tracks blood flow through the brain as the customer looks at various cues. The latter utilizes a cap of electrodes that attach to the customer’s scalp.
fMRI is highly accurate and even lets the examiners see how the “pleasure center” of the customer’s brain is responding to cues. However, it’s very expensive with the equipment costing up to $1,000/hour to run. The customers are also required to lie inside the huge machine.
EEG is much less expensive and it enables examiners to recognize anger, sorrow, lust, and excitements by measuring the electrical waves in the customer’s brain. However, it does not enable them to see deeper into the brain where the pleasure center is found.
Why Use It?
Neuromarketing is an advanced concept, but it has actually been around for about ten years now. Why would your business want to start using it?
- Keep up with your competitors. Among the list of early innovators, you’ll find companies like Campbell’s Soup, Gerber, and Frito-Lay.
- Get in before it gets big. As machinery becomes more accessible, more businesses are tapping into the power of Neuromarketing. 3
- Focus attention where it matters. The use of “eye gaze” analysis can help you figure out where to place images in your ad in order to get your ad attention, without taking away from the copy itself.
- Re-design your packaging. Packaging is by far one of the most important aspects of any product. You can join the ranks of top corporations by using neuromarketing to optimize every inch of it.
- Choose the right colors. Neuromarketing can help you select the strongest colors for your brand.
- Evaluate satisfaction. You can use neuromarketing to evaluate the emotions your brand and products provoke.
- Detect trends early. Neuromarketing can enable you to catch on to new industry trends before your competitors by getting face-to-face with your customers.
- Reveal hidden opinions. In one study, it was found that a focus group said they disliked an ad for fear of judgment from other group members. An EEG follow-up revealed that they all actually enjoyed it.
- Perfect your prototypes. Hyundai used EEG testing to reveal what features drivers liked the most in their vehicle designs.
- Set the right price. Numbers ending in $0.99 may not always be the most bargain-buyer-friendly. One study showed that round numbers work better for emotionally-charged decisions. Neuromarketing may reveal some interesting price point information for your company too.
Neuromarketing isn’t a replacement of traditional marketing methods but, rather, a field to be used alongside traditional methods to gain a clearer picture of a consumer’s profile.
Neuromarketing can provide insights into the implicit decisions of a consumer, but its still important to know the explicit decisions and attractions of consumers. It would be paired nicely with behavioural marketing.