THERE IS NO SALE WITHOUT NEUROMARKETING

Remember that one time you walked around a street, saw a beautiful dress or a nicely tailored shirt and you had to take a step back to have a second look or walk into the store to either ask for the prize and ended up buying it when you initially did not have the plan to buy anything when you left home? Maybe you wondered afterward why you bought it when you got home. That was your brain reacting to the product displayed without you consciously having a preference or a motivation to purchase that particular product. That is an effect of Neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform marketing, public relations, creative advertising, product development, pricing, etc. It is said that the brain scans and measures neural activities while performing some sort of physiological tracking which is measured through eye movement for that activity.

Therefore, neuromarketing is the application of cognitive science and neuroscience to marketing. This includes market research that tries to discover customer needs, motivations, and preferences that traditional methods like surveys and focus groups can’t describe.

Neuromarketing can include the evaluation of specific advertising, marketing, packaging, and content to more accurately understand how consumers react at the non-conscious level. It can also include applying the knowledge obtained from neuroscience and cognitive science research to make marketing more effective without testing specific ads or other materials.

Interest in consumer neuroscience started in the early 2000s when business school researchers started to demonstrate that advertising, branding, and other marketing activities can have measurable impacts on the brain where the processing of the information sent to the brain can trigger a certain psychological and physical response. In essence, every buying decision is firstly processed in the brain (consciously or unconsciously) before a physical action is taken which is, the buying.

So how do we bring this back to our customers’ everyday encounters with campaigns, marketing, and other sales methods?

We need to understand that the knowledge of a brand alters how the brain perceives and responds to the brand message. This is evident in the fact that the display of a particular product increasingly affects how the brain processes and responds to the product. Let’s say, the price of a product is displayed and that becomes the first thing that grabs attention, the way the brain will process that information is totally different from how the brain will process a product which displays more of its benefits. Another study reveals that when consumers see a price, there is a change in their mental calculation of value: When the price is displayed before exposure to the product, the neural data differs from when it is displayed after exposure, suggesting two different mental calculations: “Is this product worth the price?” when the price comes first, and “Do I like this product?” when the product comes first.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “Neuromarketing studies the brain to predict and potentially manipulate consumer behavior and decision making.” Researchers in neuromarketing measure brainwaves and chemical changes in the brain to figure out physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivation, preferences, and decisions which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas. When subjects could see the brand, the brain area associated with emotions, memories, and unconscious processing showed enhanced activity, therefore, demonstrating that knowledge of the brand altered how the brain perceived the drinks. Despite such findings and its inevitable boost in overall sales, the adoption of neuromarketing has been low, which shines a light on the skepticism revolving around the accuracy of brain scans and neural information synthesis.

We acknowledge that consumers often cannot accurately describe their preferences or decision-making processes, and as marketers, we need to understand their non-conscious thinking in order to create tailored campaigns based on these human response metrics and cognitive thinking. Human decisions are influenced by various external factors and information that are considered before making a decision. These factors include; costs, product offerings, benefits, and event probabilities, etc. However, it is now known that purchasing decisions are a product of stimulus and our brain’s response when it interacts with these elements to create a response.

Why neuromarketing?

· Neuromarketing helps us understand our customer behaviors, triggers, and preferences to help us create tailored messages in our marketing messages and sales methods.

· Keeping consumers’ attention is even more difficult and as a marketer employing neuromarketing in your marketing methods makes it easy to pass your message intent to your customer which facilitates the sales process.

· Neuromarketing exists to solve the bias that exists in consumers.

· Neuromarketing enables the building of smarter marketing strategies across all media channels which in turn, helps in cost reduction.

How to apply Neuromarketing and increase sales conversion in your business?

Neuromarketing cannot exist without neuroscience as it applies its principles in marketing. Therefore, the careful examination of the brain’s activity in certain situations creates a better understanding of how people react, respond and perceive certain things, helping them reach better marketing or buying decisions.

So, how can you apply neuromarketing to your strategy and improve your business? Well, there are a lot of ways. One of the most effective ways is to analyze the movement of the eyes. When your customer looks at the ad, does he look at the specific color, line of text, or image? Eye movement tells a lot and a thorough analysis can give you a better understanding of how your potential customer reacts to certain changes in design, offer, or product.

In addition, there are also psychological techniques that are used to trigger customers to buy a product. In our day-to-day lives, we usually see offerings like; “this product is available at a special price of $59,99.” Our brain analyzes the price and concludes that the price is good since there are decimals in the price being displayed, which makes it look cheaper.

There is a lot to learn about Neuromarketing and as a marketer myself, I always encourage businesses to apply it to their marketing strategies to increase sales and business growth.

“The mind is the bedrock of every decision we make”