What is Neuromarketing? Your Emotional Brain on Apple vs Samsung
Neuromarketing is a form of market research that studies consumers through neuroscientific techniques with the goal of explaining consumer preferences, motivations, and expectations by measuring sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to stimuli.
So what the hell does that mean?
Think of it this way:
There are two ways thoughts enter the mind. These are termed by Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman in his best-selling Thinking, Fast and Slow, as System 1 Thinking and System 2 Thinking.
Neuromarketing concerns itself with the primal System 1 — automatic, intuitive, inarticulable, preconscious, emotional reactions. To articulate System 1 is to use System 2, the logical and calculating mode, which garbles the reaction through reason.
Kahneman’s work explains that decision-making starts in System 1. System 2 primarily obeys with rationalization. In his words, System 1 “effortlessly originates impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.”
So if it’s System 1 that calls the shots, it makes sense that marketers would want to study it, right?
WAIT, BUT WHY GO TO ALL THE TROUBLE?
Because what you can’t measure, you can’t manage. If you can’t measure consumer reactions to your brand or campaign, you’ll never know how well it’s working (or not).
For instance, everyone ever wishes their branding could be as effective as Apple’s, but no one has measured Apple’s actual effect on consumer brains. Well, yes they have.
German neuroscientist Dr. Jürgen Gallinat ran an experiment comparing reactions to Samsung and Apple products. Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) he confirmed his hunch. Apple products activate the more emotional and social parts of the brain. Samsung products, on the other hand, resonate in the pre-frontal portion, the reasonable, rational bit.
Emotional experiences have a greater chance of landing in the long-term memory bank than information-laden experiences, so maxing out your brand’s emotional effect directly correlates to long-term success.
But to measure this, we need direct communication with System 1.
Crude forms of market research, like surveys and focus groups, cannot bypass System 2 thinking. If you ask someone, “Do you like this product?” you’re likely to butt up against a cognitive bias rather than the emotional core that makes the decisions. In other words, you’re not getting the whole truth.
The Goal of Neuromarketing: To learn how marketing stimuli affect consumers’ brains in various contexts and how these effects translate into decisions and behaviors.
Marketing has always been about influencing the way people think. Neuromarketing is an attempt to understand how your audience’s brains work so you know when and how your attempts at influence work.
The practice has come about as a result of developments in three connected fields: neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology. Researchers are constantly refining our grasp of how our brains experience, interpret, and act in relation to various stimuli, and marketers are learning how to apply this insight to their work.
There is a range of methods for measurement, but they generally fall into two categories: physiological (facial expressions, respiration, eye tracking, et al.) and neurological (fMRI, EEG, et al.).
WHO USES THIS NEUROMARKETING STUFF?
Plenty of folks.
Frito-Lay used Nielsen-owned neuromarketing company NeuroFocus to study female reactions to their advertising. They learned definitively that “guilt-free” works far less well than “healthy.” They also learned that the grimy yellow dust that gets on your fingers from Cheetos is actually a major factor in its appeal, so they made that the focus in their next campaign.
Baylor College of Medicine revisited the age-old Coke vs. Pepsi debate using neurofeedback technology. They found that when participants didn’t know which they were drinking, there was a 50/50 split, but when they did know what they were drinking, the vast majority preferred Coke (surprise, surprise).
The insight, however, came from the brain scans that showed the brain regions associated with memory and emotion lighting up to Coke’s brand rather than their product.
Google used biometric tests to investigate the optimal mode of delivering ads on YouTube. They found that overlay ads beat out pre-roll ads by a landslide.
Persado operates with the informed understanding that generally, emotion plays a bigger part in consumer decision-making than rationality. To give heft to our findings, we regularly test emotional language on a massive scale, even as we work toward emotional personalization through repeated testing.
Instead of monitoring consumer brains to find that an emotional reaction has occurred, we start with the emotional stimulus–words, phrases, and images our content engineers have found to elicit specific emotional reactions–and test what works for a particular region, vertical, ad type, and even individual. Our practice shares a kinship with neuromarketing, but we approach it from a different angle.
CONCLUSION
Neuromarketing has as many critics as regular marketing has ever had, and for the same reasons. But the truth is, as we’ve learned from Daniel Kahneman’s work, that our interactions with the world are inherently emotional. As social creatures, we are constantly aware of our own emotional affect on the people around us, and their effect on us.
Until now, brands were light-years away from being as nimble as the human brain. But as humans can unconsciously understand and adjust to facial expressions and body language, advertisers and marketers are slowly gaining the ability to adapt to emotional responses.
The understanding that emotional intelligence in central to creating an effective brand will continue to shift marketing toward neuromarketing until the two terms are synonymous.
Originally published at persado.com on October 4, 2016.
