Neuromarketing
What Is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is essentially designing marketing materials (including your website, ads, email campaigns and content) to evoke specific neurological reactions that trigger emotions or responses that are linked to purchasing.
The idea is to understand how your customers’ brains are actually working (not how you assume they are working) and how they’re registering your marketing content. You can use this information to optimize your content accordingly and adjust your strategies, thereby improving the effectiveness of your marketing.
Although neuromarketing may sound incredibly advanced, it’s nothing new or unusual; the term was coined in 2002, although it’s only gained validity in more recent years. You may have heard it being called consumer neuroscience or decision science.
There are still some people who write off the field’s potential, but it’s worth noting that major corporations like Hyundai have used this technology when designing everything from their ad campaigns to the products and packaging themselves.
How Does Neuromarketing Work?
Neuromarketing isn’t just about basic strategy. You can actually invest in high-level research to see how real consumers are responding neurologically to your real campaigns.
In an early study from Temple University, scientists used eight methods to test this theory, including traditional surveys, eye tracking, heart rate, breathing, brain activity (with fMRI: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and brain waves (with EEG: electroencephalography):
fMRIs monitor brain activity by assessing blood flow as the subjects respond to audio and visual cues. Researchers will watch to see if they’re eliciting the emotional responses they’re hoping for.
If they wanted to adopt out puppies, for example, they’d hopefully see the pleasure center of the brain light up, but if they want to create an ad that evokes fear so customers will buy their security system, they may want to look for a fear-based neurological response.
EEGs are much cheaper than MRIs and work by using a cap of electrodes that’s attached to the person's scalp, evaluating the electrical waves that the brain produces. Researchers are able to track instinctual emotions like excitement, lust and anger based on the fluctuations in electrical waves. Keep in mind that, while effective, EEGs can’t give researchers a read on the deeper parts of the brain where the pleasure center is located.
What Is Neuromarketing Used For?
Part of the confusion surrounding neuromarketing rests in the inability to immediately see how it can be implemented into existing business practices. The problem is that neuromarketing has many uses, which means most explanations regarding neuromarketing’s utility remain vague and imprecise—adding to the confusion. Neuromarketing’s flexibility, while confusing at first, is also the industry’s greatest asset. In practice, neuromarketing can be used to answer almost any research question that marketers might have about their product—even questions that traditional marketing research can’t tackle.
For example, one brand might use SST to test whether the end branding of an advertisement is being encoded into long-term memory while another brand might use the same technology to optimize their ad for mobile platforms. There is no single use case for neuromarketing. Neuromarketing research topics define the methodology and the technology to be implemented not the other way around. Here are just a few of neuromarketing’s primary applications:
Product design testing
UX/ website testing
Multi-screen ready/cross-platform testing
Second-by-second optimization of TV advertisements
Audio branding testing
How Is Neuromarketing Useful in Marketing Research?
Neuromarketing can be exceptionally useful when it comes to marketing research. If it weren't, we wouldn’t have big brands like Google, HP, Microsoft, Frito-Lay, Hyundai, CBS and ESPN investing in it so much.
The ability to measure physiological consumer responses to everything from a product’s packaging to the ad with which you are promoting it is valuable, especially when you follow up with an in-depth interview about why the consumer felt the way they did. This can give you incredible insight into how effective your current campaigns are and what you can do to improve them.
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 Examples
Let's take a look at a few examples of companies that are taking advantage of neuromarketing and and neuroscience.
PayPal used neuromarketing company NeueroFocus to help refine their forgettable brand message (essentially: “Safe, simple, wow!”). They tested different key phrases to use in marketing for the different features, and when they improved PayPal’s “visual and verbal identity” based off of neuromarketing data, their click-through and response rates increased 3-4X.
Hyundai hooked members of their target audience up to a UGC, asked them to look at different parts of one of their cars and captured their brain activity while they did so. The study focused on the “primal” parts of the brain that triggered subconscious emotions and the results led to the company improving the car's exterior.
IKEA used neuroscience to ask “radical, disruptive questions about IKEA’s business” such as what new sources of energy, textiles and plastics could they use. They used high-resolution EEG headsets and eye trackers on IKEA customers in Poland and the Netherlands to gauge “reactions to new business models.” Today, IKEA has a new business model and undertakings such as a “home solar offering that enables customers to generate their own renewable energy [and] a shift to renewable plastics.”
Intel wanted to understand how consumers felt about their brand in a more thorough way than conducting old-school market research. They hired NeuroFocus to discover the specific words that people associated with Intel and whether these associations were affected by a person's culture. After analyzing the EEG results of their volunteers in both the U.S. and China in which 64 sensors were attached to their heads to measure their brain's electrical activity, they learned new information that they “would have never learned through traditional market research and focus groups, where cultural biases come into play.”
How to Use Neuromarketing in Your Campaigns
Ready for some neuromarketing 101?
Whether you’re investing in biometric research with your consumers or want to stick to tried-and-true neuromarketing strategies, these six cognitive and emotional techniques can help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Trigger Emotional Responses
Easier said than done, I know, but this is a solid strategy that’s really at the base of neuromarketing.
Psychology has shown us that consumers unconsciously gravitate more towards avoiding pain than we do towards gaining something positive. This all comes down to the loss aversion phenomenon, where we fear losing something more than we value getting something.
Therefore, appealing to pain points that can trigger an emotional response tied to loss avoidance can be a strong marketing strategy. It’s why SaaS campaigns that stress how much time you’re losing by not using their tool can be so insanely effective: think about all that lost time, lost productivity and lost revenue!
Draw Attention Where You Want It
We are neurologically wired to respond to certain visual cues, and knowing these tricks can help you direct the viewer’s gaze right where you want it, putting a big emphasis on the product or service that you want to sell. For example, using contrasting colors to draw the eye straight to a CTA button is a common tactic.
Another example goes right back to middle school, where one kid looks up at the ceiling to see how many people around him he can get to look up, too. An Australian usability specialist actually found that when consumers are viewing an ad that features a person looking at something, their eyes automatically go to what the subject in the ad is looking at.
Leverage Information “Anchoring”
“Anchoring” is a neuromarketing technique in which “the brain often sees the first number and uses it as a price anchor. When different prices appear, the brain makes a rough comparison that is influenced by the anchor.”
Let’s say you find a pair of sweatpants that you love, but cringe when you see the price tag of $80. Even with great reviews, you can't help but wonder how this simple item could be worth it. But then later you see that the store has dropped the price to $60. Compared to the first (the “anchor”) price, $60 seems reasonable.
Now let’s imagine that you see the same sweatpants for the first time at $60. $60?! That’s so expensive for sweatpants! They only seemed cheaper in the scenario above because you’ve already had a higher anchor, making the new price seem like a deal.
Make Design Work for You
As crazy as it may sound, we read a lot (usually unconsciously) into the visuals that we see in marketing campaigns.
Research found that people make judgments subconsciously within 90 seconds of of first seeing something or someone, and that 62-90% of that assessment is based on color alone.
