Read your customer's brain with Neuromarketing
Last Wednesday I made a slight reference about neuromarketing.
Not to be confused with Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, which just last week allowed a chip-implanted pig to play Pong.
Let’s start with what neuromarketing is.
Neuromarketing is the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers' motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas
Combining both brain science with marketing, neuromarketing was once a popular and trendy buzz word that only had a short time in the mainstream spotlight. Back in the 2010s, it went mainstream with the release of the book Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing by Roger Dooley. The book rewrote my entire marketing philosophy.
At the time, the concept of neuromarketing scared a lot of people. Consumers like to believe the choices they make were their own. However, using brain scanning tools like fMRI and EEG, neuroscience was able to provide insight to marketers that a lot of buying decisions were actually based on physiological impulses.
Neuromarketing eventually split into a variety of individual marketing tactics: heat maps, eye tracking, UX, A/B testing, power words in copywriting, product design, and more. A lot of it can also be associated to traditional product marketing tactics such as price positioning, emotional branding, and packaging. But at least for me, science-meets-marketing began with neuromarketing.
From what I know of, there are 12 areas where neuromarketing have found most solid grounding. I’ll split these into separate posts so I can go into detail for each.
Let’s start with the three most basic marketing principals that overlap with neuroscience.
Colours and Persuasion
You may already know this, but colours evoke different emotions. Choosing the right colour creates physiological responses that can impact a buyer’s decision making process.
Colours can be associated to a variety of moods, and can influence branding, product design, and advertising.
However, choosing colours isn’t always so linear. It’s also dependent on culture, gender, variations in your target market, and more.
Material Sentiment
Frito-Lay is known for a popular study with respondents, where they used neuroimaging to deliver different materials for their potato chip packaging. Responses were recorded as positive, negative or neutral, followed by interviews to discuss colour, text and imagery. Shiny packaging had a negative impact for customers, and instead pushing the company towards the material that didn’t have a negative impact: matte.
Sustainability and eco-friendly solutions have become more important than ever, which also impacts buyer decision making.
Decision Paralysis
Too many choices can put a pause in the buying process. Columbia University revealed in a study that monitored a display with varying amount of options concluded that customers were less likely to stop to view the displays with a comprehensive set of options.
It’s easy to assume that more options equals more sales, but additional choices can potentially add more stress to the customer, and require more energy to make a simple buying decision. In today’s content-driven world, asking more questions and providing 1-2 solutions focused on the buyer’s needs is essential for driving engagement and sales. That’s why every social media platform switched their feeds from chronological to personalized.
On Wednesday, we’ll jump into the next three advanced neuromarketing cases: eye tracking, attention-getting headlines, and revealing the hidden response.
That person who’s purchasing the product may have certain conscious needs… but there are also unconscious needs that the buyer probably is less concerned about.
—Roger Dooley, author
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