Neuromarketing tries to study about the functioning of the brain after a consumer watches an advertisement. Breaking down the term neuromarketing we get “neuro” which means brain and “marketing” which means communicating about the product.
Marketers take advantage of subconscious decision making process and create better advertisement. In simpler words, suppose you’re a consumer and I’m a marketer and I showed you an advertisement of Coke. What you’ll feel? Thirsty? Exactly!! This is the functionality of brain. But for some people this functionality doesn’t work in the sense not everybody thinks alike. Some might feel thirsty and some might not.
Therefore marketers came up with neuromarketing to understand the science behind functioning of brain. To solve some chaotic questions like what happens when an individual watches an ad?, how one reacts? Does the ad creates any stimulation? and many more, to create better version of ads to attract more customers.
You might be thinking but why using science? Why not market research! Actually Neural Marketers understand that consumers don’t always do the things they say they’ll do.
We react to each and every thing around us in seconds making subconscious decisions that affect what we do, what we say, how we react and what we buy without us even realizing it. How many times have you gone to the supermarket with a set of list but end up in impulse buying. Also how many times you just start doing a dance step when a famous song popped up in your head, these are both examples of subconscious affects. Our decisions with technology, neuromarketers can measure these subconscious decisions & examine how our buying behavior is affected.
What’s in it for me?
- Who Founded/ Discovery of Neuromarketing
- Who uses Neuromarketing
- Techniques/ Methods of Measuring Neuromarketing
- Advantages & Disadvantages
- Examples
- Conclusion
- FAQs
WHO FOUNDED/ DISCOVERY OF NEUROMARKETING?
Advertisers spends millions of rupees deliberately to influence the way you think. But according to one psychologist ads could be a lot more powerful if they took account of people’s subconscious reactions. He designed a machine to do just that and he claims it can detect what you really feel about an ad.
Advertising was simple earlier, say it loud, clear and often it was called the hard sell. But over the years, a gentle art of persuasion has emerged the soft sell of messages and dreamlike visions. It may be creative but if doesn’t sell your product, you need to know why.
Since we already read in the above mentioned paragraphs that we don’t always do the things we say so whatever you might say during a market research might not be true. Hence to find out what actually your mind thinks and reacts Mindlab International invented a first ever TV demonstration in 1991. This tool was then used for innovative neuromarketing consumer research in 2014 after many year of work and improvement.
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WHO USES NEUROMARKETING?
Nowadays neuromarketing has surrounded us everywhere. Whenever we look at something whether it be a poster, logo or a package it activates a range of associated ideas in our mind. Many giant companies like Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Coca-cola, Hyundai, etc. use this as a complement with the traditional market research. Some of them buy tools/ techniques to measure it. Some opt to buy information or resources from neuromarketing laboratories that include third party research to carry out studies.
TECHNIQUES/ METHODS OF MEASURING NEUROMARKETING
It is a technology that records the responses of brain activity through direct use of brain scanning and brain imaging to measure a response to a particular products, packaging, advertising or other marketing elements.
Researchers uses either FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) or EEG (Electroencephalogram) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain and to learn why consumers make the decisions according to what their brain ask them to do also find out which part of their brain encourages to do so.
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Neuromarketing Measures-
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging–
It’s a machine where our head is inserted and scanning of our brain activity is done. The functional areas of brain is checked. It checks how your brain feels and reacts after watching, eating, touching, etc. anything. How a specific product affects your brain and it’s parts.
According to studies, it has been found that our brain has three parts- New, Middle and Reptilian. All three has different functions.
New brain which is known as the Neocortex is rational or the thinking brain, it makes logical decisions based on comparing thoughts.
Middle brain also known as the Limbic system is emotional or can called feeling brain, it focuses more on emotions rather than logic.
Reptilian brain also called Instinctive brain is the decision maker and which is the most important part of the brain which marketers try to trigger. The main motive of marketing is to sell product so marketers try to understand what are the factors that affect decision making of any individual.
Electrical waves-
This technique checks the density of electrical signal. Basically our mind transfer signal to other parts of the brain whenever an activity happens. So with the help of this one can track the movement of these electric signals and find out the activity of the brain.
Facial Coding-
In this we measure the emotion that is being displayed on their face.
Voice Analysis-
We pay attention to the tone of the voice of an individual.
Eyeball Movement-
In this technique, marketers decide according to the movement of your eyeball whether you liked it or not. In simple words, it tracks the movement of eyes. There are many body language detecting technique to find out what are you thinking. Eyeball movement comes under this.
ADVANTAGES/ DISADVANTAGES OF NEUROMARKETING
Advantages
It is vital for success to know the behavior of the consumer. So marketing nowadays is based on understanding consumer behavior, which is ultimately the understanding of how people make decisions about what they want need or buy. Through traditional research marketers get inaccurate, inappropriate and manipulated results due to human error so to know the exact accurate data about the consumer behavior, neuromarketing is used. It directly measures customers underlying thoughts, feelings and intentions.
Disadvantages
There’s merely any disadvantage of using such technology which changed the whole way of doing marketing and advertising, except one. The only one disadvantage of neuromarketing is that it’s way too costly. An FMRI machine cost ranges between 50,000 to 1 million dollar. Which a small scale or a medium size startup could not afford. Neuromarketing involves huge cost to give high accurate results, which is not possible for each and every company to afford and they continue to opt for traditional research.
EXAMPLES
There’s a diaper ad in two different visuals. They have the same content they don’t have much difference in the ad, the only difference is where the baby is looking. In one ad baby is looking in the front, you can say at you, and in the other the baby is looking at the headline of the content.
While comparing these two ads through neuromarketing experimenting on different people, most of the people got engaged through the second ad, one with the baby looking at the content. Because in the first version of the ad people were so drawn and distracted by the baby that they barely process any information from the ad.
However, in the second version, marketers took advantage of visual biases and created an ad where people naturally followed the gaze of the baby reading the text. Therefore this small insignificant change brought such major changes in the success of an ad.
Watch Neuromarketing- You are being controlled while buying by Sahil Khanna for more information.
CONCLUSION
We all come across many things in a day, whenever you go for purchasing anything from a shop, that is already pre-decided through this technology. Eventually researchers has already decided the color, pricing, packaging, etc. of the product considering that you will buy that product. In this day and age, when we are exposed to more than four thousand ads every single day, psychology and neuroscience are essential to creating strong advertisements.
By looking at the centers of our brain that deal with attention, memory and emotion, neuromarketers can measure our overall engagement with an ad and see how likely we are to buy a product. In traditional marketing we take consumers and we ask them what do they want and based on their responses we’ll build one product or we’ll build a strategy that will sell the product. But guess what, they don’t know what they want. That is why we use neuromarketing, here we gonna take customer and we gonna ask them what do they want, but we won’t trust their answers because we know that they don’t know.
Instead we’re going to look at various physiological changes that happen in their brain. Here’s what neuroscientist has discovered over the years is that, our instinctual self (reptilian brain), has a greater impact on our final decision than the rational (new brain) us or even the emotional us. That is why to understand the instinct of an individual person researchers use neuromarketing.
Read some more of my article:
| AIDA Model- Discover the 4 Easy Steps |
| Building a Marketing Plan in 5 Simple Steps |
| Ingredients of Service Marketing- 4 Important Concepts |
FAQs
After reading the article it must be clear to you that how much effective does Neuromarketing is than the traditional marketing. As it can give you the appropriate data about what exactly people think on a particular advertisement.
In the era of technology, Social Media is a powerful tool to get connected to anybody anywhere. As well as Social media gives you the exact analytical data of the consumer watching the ad.
