The concept of Marketing is evolving day by day, it’s getting tougher for the marketer to understand consumer behavior and to design a strategy according to that.
Martin Lindstrom, the main initiator. An international expert in Branding Policy. He was fascinated by the application of techniques derived from Neuroscience to Marketing. He points out certain shortcomings of traditional marketing studies, which can be solved with the adoption of a Neuromarketing approach.
In the US, the first extensive Neuromarketing study was launched between 2004 and 2007.
What is Neuromarketing?
Use the advances made by neuroscience to improve the understanding of consumer behavior, in particular, consumers’ emotions, which hold the key to a part of their purchasing decision, but also their memorization and their positive or negative desires.
Using neuromarketing, you can rethink your strategies and create smarter marketing that will boost the effectiveness of your efforts. The goal of it is to understand how your customer’s brain works and what affects your marketing will have on the population of consumers.
This whole process involves, the working of the Brain and how it gives its instructions to the human body by secreting hormones or neurotransmitters.
By appealing directly to the brain, Neuromarketing avoids the biases of the questionnaire and the difficulty in describing emotions or what our senses express.
There are two basic methods of tracking prospects’ brain activity each with their own pros and cons: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG).
Utilizing fMRI involves using a powerful magnet to track the brain’s blood flow as subjects respond to audio and visual cues. This allows examiners to access a deep part of the brain known as the “pleasure center” and lets marketers know how people are really responding to their work.
EEG, on the other hand, is much cheaper than fMRI, and by using a cap of electrodes attached to the sample’s scalp, it also allows for movement.
These electrodes measure electrical waves produced by the brain and allow researchers to track instinctual emotions such as anger, excitement, sorrow, and lust through fluctuations of activity.
Nowadays, a large part of our purchasing is essentially linked to our emotions, we can see this tradition even with Gen X and Gen Y. Emotions are progressively replacing logic. Internet, virtual, and interactive world reinforces this trend even today.
By applying techniques stemming from Neurosciences, with an analytical tool, a state of mind, an approach, and technical expertise, Neuromarketing will enhance today’s and tomorrow’s marketing.
As we know, customer needs becoming the number one source of inspiration in the development of products and services.
To succeed, neuromarketing must be capable of convincing customers, so they buy, and decision-makers, so that they agree to give marketing the budget and resources necessary to please, convince and attract customers.
For marketers, customer experience is always a trump card, the days of ‘Rampant Materialism’ are gone, and we are living in the experience era, we want experiences that we can share, that create fantastic memories.
The best neuromarketing principle:
You don’t need an MRI or any medical equipment to know this
- Don’t use “we,” or talk about your corporation. Focus on your customer’s pain points, not yours.
- Get to the point. Your message is competing with about 10,000 other messages sent to the brain daily.
- Be visual. Don’t just tell about a product; show it. And if you can’t show an image, create a mental image for your customers.
- Keep it concrete. Ads with facial expressions, which help decode people’s intentions, are one example.
- Close strong. People pay the most attention at the beginning and end of an ad. This will help ensure memory storage
- Use emotion. Surprise, laughter, fear, and anger all cause disruption— and thus, trigger memory.
Remember, the experience must be vivid, original, and intriguing to capture consumers’ imaginations and stir their emotions, for this Neuroscience is the best answer. To be truly successful, your marketing should encompass every human sense.
It’s the fact that a customer’s real experience with the product or service will be shaped by his or her expectations and beliefs about that particular product or service.
All human feelings, thoughts, and actions, even consciousness itself are the products of neural activity in the brain.
For marketers, the promise of this idea-neurobiology can reduce the uncertainty and conjecture that traditionally hamper efforts to understand consumer behavior. Consider studies on how the brain predicts and manipulates consumer behavior and decision-making.
Good marketers often make the sale using the feelings and emotions of the customers, and then close the deal with a financial incentive that has an expiration looming.
Neuromarketing groundbreaking studies the potential to create value for marketers with a powerful tool for learning about customers. Advances in medicine, computer sciences, and radiology paved for new studies.
For India, the concept of Neuromarketing is just the beginning and we still have a long way to go. This will make your marketing effort much smoother.