All human consciousness, emotions, thoughts, and actions derive from neural activity in the brain. Marketers use this information to influence consumers into making decisions. Through the use of psychology and brain activity, marketers come up with different techniques to tailor their brand campaigns and advertisements to appeal to consumers - this is called neuromarketing.
If you are new to neuromarketing, this article is essential reading!
What is Neuromarketing?
To put it simply, neuromarketing is about gaining insight into consumer's unconscious minds through research. It provides the means to uncover their motivations, their preferences and their decision-making process by accessing their subconscious. Neuromarketing is useful to brands as it provides substantial additional information about their target market, allowing them to shape their brand, create positive associations and tailor their marketing strategies to appeal to consumers.
Our subconscious reacts almost instantaneously to any stimulus. For example, it takes less than a second to create the first impression of a website through our subconscious. According to research, 95% of our decisions to purchase a product or service are as a result of our subconscious mind.
Brands basically use psychology to understand more about their consumers' emotional responses, so as to develop stronger positive associations with their products. Although the process is relatively simple, it requires some extra tools which have been progressively developed over the last 15 years, so it’s fairly new.
What Tools Does Neuromarketing Require?
Now that we’ve covered exactly what neuromarketing is, let’s get into the tools that neuromarketing requires. Basically, an EEG or an fMRI machine measures brain activity. The EEG machine tracks changes in neural activity and the fMRI machine shows the regions in our brain that are activated. EEG machines track subconscious brain activity to measure the level of engagement and recall, while fMRI's measure the level of engagement, recall, and detailed emotional responses.
However, although these two machines provided the initial means for neuromarketing, cheaper and more portable alternatives have now been developed.
Eye-tracking
Eye-tracking is a neuromarketing technique that requires the use of glasses with integrated cameras or a screen-based eye tracker through which the eye movement of the participant is tracked. Using such a technique exposes the attention of the participant while viewing marketing stimuli such as advertisements.
This can inform a brand about the effectiveness of their advertisement—for example, in an ad about a car, if the viewer is too distracted by the pretty models, then the ad isn’t effective enough. Through eye-tracking, brands can understand and use best practices for marketing in advertisements and websites—such as knowing where and when to place texts, images, and more.
Facial Coding
Our emotions tend to reflect what we're feeling and can be seen on our faces via micro facial movements. Artificial intelligence software has developed a means of translating those micro facial movements into specific emotions, which enables our emotional reaction from a stimulus to be measured.
Generating emotion helps to create memorable marketing campaigns and advertisements, which is why brands aim to create commercials and campaigns that trigger our emotions so that we associate memories with them. An effective advertisement is one that clearly portrays the products and the essence of a brand and stirs up our emotions sufficiently to create those memories. That’s why facial coding is such a useful neuromarketing technique.
By using facial coding software marketers can determine whether an advertisement or a campaign has a positive or negative effect on the participant. It provides the capability for brands to accurately assess triggers, emotions, what works, or what they have to change and improve.
What Are the Benefits of Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing has several benefits for brands if they use it properly. Neuromarketing can be applied to UX and UI website testing in terms of where text and images should be placed, in product design to improve branding and set pricing, improve ad content, and more. Basically, brands can use neuromarketing to develop best marketing practices for their brands to appeal to their target market and strengthen their associations with products and services
Using eye-tracking and facial coding can also help to improve the impact of creative content. Research has shown that neuroscientific tools are better at predicting market-level behavior as compared to standard tools such as questionnaires and surveys. This means that brands can effectively employ the use of neuromarketing techniques to create memorable marketing campaigns and influence consumers.
What Are Some Examples of Neuromarketing?
With neuromarketing being so effective, it’s no wonder that big companies are employing the use of neuro techniques to build their brands. For example, M&M's use neuromarketing to improve sales. Their products are associated with the pleasure and reward center of the brain and they use their campaigns to develop anticipation, expectation, and rewards. The body reacts to these stimuli in the same way it responds to touch, sound and scent, which M&M have successfully used to their advantage..
Another example of the effective use of neuromarketing is through Lay’s “Operation Smile” campaign. They repackaged their products to portray a different smile—and smiling is contagious. This encourages consumers to laugh, smile, and share with their friends and family. Additionally, since every flavour has a different smile, it encourages consumers to buy numerous flavours to experience all the smiles.
Although neuromarketing is fairly new, it’s proved to be very effective. It can help brands in rebranding their image, providing them with better engagement, and, as a result, increasing conversion rates.
Researchers, agencies and brands choose Smile Reader to capture attention and emotion analytics in incredible detail, using a self-serve SaaS Platform. This rich data provides valuable insights that enables them to deliver innovative research, increase brand equity, develop winning products and run high performance marketing campaigns.
Researchers, agencies and brands choose Smile Reader to deliver valuable insights that increase brand equity and achieve high performance marketing campaigns.
For more information on their emotion recognition services, click here.