Gone are the days when decision making used to be an easy task. In today’s world, making a purchase decision seems like a herculean task, especially, given the amount of information and the range of brands available in the market. It is seen that even the simplest product float adrift in a sea of possibility. So, what makes customers finally come to a decision? The answer can be anything from packaging to personal experience of the product to the shelving and so on. Wading through the countless options to make a logical purchase is sometimes overwhelming. This rule can be applied to almost any product. As a result, consumers make almost all of their decisions subconsciously, far from conscious reasoning.
However, often it is seen that marketers tend to lean towards using traditional methodology like surveys, focus group, etc to conduct their market research. But the real issue is, if consumers are making the decisions subconsciously and can’t express their views precisely, how relevant is the information gathered during the research?
That’s where neuro marketing comes to the aid. It’s considered as the only way to gather information directly from the source of human decision making, which is the subconscious.
But what is Neuromarketing?
It is a strategy that uses the knowledge of neuroscience and cognitive science to accurately identify customer needs, desires, and preferences. It studies consumers’ responses to marketing stimuli and assesses non-conscious reactions to specific advertising campaigns, packaging, design, etc. The approach helps develop effective marketing campaigns and strategies that resonate with the target audience.
The emergence of neuromarketing also shows that with every passing year, marketing has become more and more of a science and less of an art. Neuromarketing is the study of how people's brains respond to advertising and other brand-related messages by scientifically monitoring brainwave activity, eye tracking and skin response. These neuromarketing techniques are used to study the brain to predict consumer decision-making behaviour. It's also possible to use neuromarketing to try to manipulate consumer behaviour. To do this, marketer use neural and other physiological signals and gain insight into customers' motivations, preferences and decision-making processes. They also use this research to predict how a particular product, service or marketing campaign will perform.
But when we talk about neuromarketing, it is often met with its fair share of controversies and whether it is legal or not. Many scientists highlight the debatable nature of neuromarketing as it is often assumed or seen that several types of ads might be deceptive and dishonest. They also add that these methods influence people’s brains and encourage customers to take the desired action. On the contrary, neuromarketing advocates claim that their techniques help understand customers’ needs and desires and serve them better.
Keeping the debates at bay, neuromarketing companies tend to operate ethically towards consumers the same way regular advertising agencies do. They don’t intend to promote illegal and deceptive products and create ads that control consumers’ purchasing decisions. Neuromarketers opine that this approach allows customers to understand the patterns of their choices. Besides, it enables people to find out whether companies manipulate their buying decisions or influence them. Hence, it is a legal technique which can be fruitful if implemented in marketing strategies.
Neuromarketing can be utilized for a range of consumer research opportunities, including measuring neural responses to product ads, packaging, price, and ease of use. EEG headsets monitor and localize spikes in electrical activity throughout the brain, providing real-time results that can be a proxy to assess emotional states affected by a variety of marketing elements. Researchers can assess levels of excitement or relaxation in response to different colours, track eye gaze exhibited during ads and website use, experiment with different product displays in order to decrease decision paralysis, measure activity in the brain’s pleasure spot in response to product pricing, and determine points of agitation during product testing, among other applications.
Neuromarketing is a new tool that complements traditional research like mentioned earlier, to help brands, marketing and advertising agencies understand their clients in a holistic manner and bridge the gap in research. Not only large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Disney, Hyundai, and Coca-Cola, are conscious of its possibilities and make use of this new type of research, but many new or smaller companies also carry out these types of studies to know more about the decision-making process, what motivates purchasing decisions, how to improve the usability of their websites, test their product, optimize social media or ad campaigns to improve conversion rate, create a sense in brands, and assess their traditional or digital marketing strategies, among many others. Hence, for a system that was born a few years ago, it holds a lot of prospects than one would imagine.
