Neuromarketing meets product design
On Monday we explored the concepts of neuromarketing, a form of marketing that utilizes neuroscience to improve efficiency when marketing to customers. In other words, it’s marketing to the physiological responses of your customer’s brain. 🧠
Similar to other disciplines of marketing, neuromarketing has unequivocally embedded itself into the product design process. While colours and persuasions in my last post align well with product design, today we’ll cover three additional product considerations that align with neuroscience.
Importance of design
My first car was a ‘97 Tiburon. One of the most beautiful cars ever released by Hyundai.
The inexpensive sports coupe had a discreet cool factor that a 19 year old me really aligned with. I loved the sleek side profile, midnight blue shade, and the mini shark fin on the roof. Despite the 1.8L engine and a hilariously low 130 horsepower, when I drove it, I felt complete.
In one of a handful of neuromarketing case studies, in 2011 Hyundai connected a group of 15 men and women to EEG machines to monitor their responses to a variety of car designs. While the details of the experiment didn’t go public, they did make changes to their product design based on feedback from the test group.
Product design can be subjective to audience, culture, trends, and the creative eye of the designer. In a lot of cases, mixed feedback might even confuse the matter. However neuromarketing provides a non-bias solution that offers larger weight over feedback surveys and individual customer interviews.
More recently, SpaceX tapped into renowned Hollywood superhero-costume designer Jose Fernandez for their new spacesuits. You don’t need to see an EEG machine graph to know the design is significantly more exciting than the traditional astronaut suit. From a cultural point of view, it rides the futuristic vibe of Daft Punk. Plus, minimalism is trendy. Good design can be defined as the intersection point between trending and timeless.
Incredible side note: Fernandez is the designer and sculptor of four Batman suits, from Michael Keaton to Batfleck.
Speaking of cars and product design, if you’re interested in reading about what makes cars beautiful, you can read one of my older articles on HuffPost where I interviewed Kemal Curic, Lincoln's newly appointed Chief Exterior Designer. We discussed five pillars to Lincoln’s product design: confidence, attention to detail, complimentary technology, elegance, and most importantly, an attraction to your senses.
Emotional vs. logical pricing
Most marketers are aware of pricing strategy. The age ol’ story of Walmart’s success with precise number pricing, and the perception of cheaper. Yada yada yada.
Pricing in neuromarketing is a little more detailed.
There are two opposing camps when it comes to pricing: rounded numbers ($5), or precise numbers ($4.92).
What neuroscience has shown is that rounded numbers use less thinking power than precise numbers.
Rounded number pricing is emotional pricing, and is easier for the brain to process. If it’s $5, it’s $5. No anchor is required to understand whether a product has a good benefit-cost ratio. It’s partially why Fiverr has been so successful.
Precise number pricing is considered logical pricing, and is more energy intensive. It creates friction and evokes the thinking part of the brain. It does have its benefits when competing on price.
For emotional pricing - pick a round number, put an emphasis on branding images, and associate your product with an emotion (fun, inspirational, trendy).
For logical pricing - choose a precise number below the emotional price, focus on features, and expect to compete on price.
You can read more about emotional vs. logical pricing on neurosciencemarketing.com.
Dopamine and the rewards system
I’ve written extensively on dopamine and its role with extrovert marketers (and if Substack had a way for me to search my own articles, I could provide more reference links!). But to summarize dopamine: it’s the happy chemical in your brain that is fuelled by an internal reward system.
You can imagine dopamine having an extreme effect on certain industries such as social media, video games, gambling, and more. Based on extensive research on driving motivation in video games, gaming addiction can be associated directly to continuous dopamine release. Social media addiction ties directly with many small dopamine releases from each like, comment, or news feed refresh.
For example, people love their tattoos. The people that really love them are the ones who associate the physical sensation of being tattooed with a dopamine release.
And before you think that integrating a rewards programs will solve everything: traditional loyalty programs only work when the product is itself motivating. A fantastic product will always evoke an organic and natural attraction to it; loyalty and rewards programs are only meant to further support it.
Finding a way to make your product release dopamine is the difference between average and stellar.
Next up, we’ll continue with another three ways that the brain controls everything.
Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.
—John D. Berry, typographer
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