What is neuromarketing and how to apply it

The term "neuromarketing" is a fusion of the words "neurobiology" (the science of the structure, functioning and development of the nervous system) and "marketing".

Eil Smidts, the author of the term, believes that neuromarketing allows us to “better understand consumers and their reactions to marketing stimuli by directly measuring processes in the brain” and to improve “the effectiveness of marketing methods by studying brain reactions.”

Neuromarketing allows you to determine the consumer's attitude to the product even before he himself has realized it, and even more - to influence it. This is the main difference between neuromarketing and traditional marketing - it does not require the collection and analysis of data on the subjective preferences of the buyer.

How Neuromarketing Affects Us

You may not realize it, but marketers meticulously find our pain points and press them one by one, exploring where it hurts the most – all in order to get us to buy more.

This is why people often spend money on things they don’t need: girls, following fashion, buy clothes that don’t suit them, and students save up their scholarship money and put their stomachs through hard times to save up for an iPhone.

Marketers have dug even deeper and reached the part of our being that is inaccessible to us – our subconscious. They have learned to identify natural processes occurring in our brain under the influence of various factors and use the acquired knowledge for marketing purposes. This is what neuromarketing is, and this is what we will talk about in this article.

Neuromarketing Research Tools

Unlike traditional marketing research methods that rely on consumer self-reports (surveys, focus groups), neuromarketing studies the brain's immediate reactions, which are often not consciously perceived by a person. This allows for more objective and reliable data on what really attracts consumers' attention, evokes emotions, and influences their purchasing decisions.

• Electroencephalography (EEG): measures the electrical activity of the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. Allows you to track brain activity in real time and identify emotional reactions to marketing stimuli (advertisements, packaging, website design, etc.). This data is mainly used to develop advertising materials and brand positioning.
• Magnetoencephalography (MEG): measures magnetic fields created by the brain's electrical activity. Similar to EEG, but more accurate and allows for more precise localization of brain activity.
• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Visualizes changes in blood flow within the brain. This helps to understand which areas of the brain are activated when consumers make a purchasing decision. fMRI is used to understand what emotions consumers experience, whether they activate memories in response to a stimulus such as a brand mention, and how engaged they are with advertising. This helps to improve brand positioning and set the best prices.
• Eye-tracking: When a person looks at something pleasant, their pupils dilate. Therefore, monitoring the pupil width and the direction of the gaze provides information about the consumer's preferences. The results of such research help improve the design of the website, packaging and advertising materials.
• Biometric measurements: measure physiological responses such as pulse, respiration, galvanic skin response, facial expressions to determine emotional responses to stimuli.
• Facial expression analysis: tracking a person's facial expressions as they interact with a product or advertisement to determine their emotional response (e.g. surprise, joy, sadness, irritation, etc.).

Conducting such research is, of course, expensive, but you can use the results of others.

For example, good designers understand how certain colors work in marketing and how they influence purchasing decisions, thus creating a certain image of a product.

In the same way, you can use the knowledge of what kind of music your establishment needs, what smells attract customers, etc.

Application of neuromarketing in advertising

1. Use of color. Green is calming, blue is trustworthy, and black is status-conscious. It may seem like some kind of metaphysics. But studies show that red actually increases heart rate, and blue lowers blood pressure. That's why brands carefully consider the colors for their logos, website design, and stores.

It is no coincidence that the McDonald's logo uses a combination of red and yellow: red increases the pulse and increases appetite, and yellow is associated with happiness

2. Using smells. Smells are another powerful neuromarketing tool. It is very effective, since information about smells always reaches the brain faster than signals from the eyes and ears. One example: Nike used the smell of grass in one of its stores, which caused customers to associate it with a football match. The number of sales in the scented hall increased by 80%.

Supermarkets bake buns right on the premises because the smell of freshly baked goods makes you hungry and encourages you to buy bread, even if you don’t need it.

3. Lighting. There is evidence that shoppers react differently to products depending on lighting. In one experiment, researchers identified three groups of consumers based on their psychological type: aesthetes, hedonists, and traditionalists. Each group responds better to its own type of lighting. Using this data, retailers can design stores to suit the needs of their target audience.

For example, clothing stores are usually brightly lit - this invigorates and encourages people to buy more. On the contrary, coffee shops use dim lighting to create a relaxing atmosphere.

4. Using cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are thinking errors that occur when the brain simplifies incoming information.
A simple example is the crowd effect. If everyone around you is praising a new phone model, someone might think that it really is great because so many people can’t be wrong. In online sales, the default option effect is often used: for example, when a more expensive product is offered as a basic option.

There are about a hundred cognitive distortions in total. Marketers' tricks based on such errors can be quite transparent - for example, when a service offers a free trial in the hope that you won't be able to refuse it, or completely manipulative - for example, when a store shows false messages that almost all the goods are sold out and there are only two left.

Example: An airline automatically adds insurance to plane tickets. This is using a cognitive bias: it is easier for a person to rely on a choice that someone else has made for him.

5. Impact on hearing. An effective motivator for shopping is background music in stores: light, pleasant, not burdensome, but rhythmic and dynamic enough – it seems to encourage shopping. Moreover, different stores use different music: in clothing stores – music from fashion catwalks, in children’s stores – music for children, in supermarkets – calm, unobtrusive music, in massage parlors – sounds of nature, etc. Another example of influencing the decision to buy through hearing is TV and radio advertising. 
Rhymed lines are especially etched in the memory: “Cleanliness – pure Tide!”, “Gillette – there is nothing better for a man”, “Mezim – irreplaceable for the stomach”; as well as other intricate advertising slogans.

6. Impact through taste. Neuromarketing methods allow tracking the brain's response to different taste sensations and using the data obtained to improve the taste of food. 
On the one hand, this allows you to create amazing culinary masterpieces and improve the taste and quality of products. But, on the other hand, this can lead to the use of addictive substances in food (a sad example is monosodium glutamate).

7. Dopamine loop. Dopamine is a hormone of joy, which is produced, including when receiving some kind of reward, especially an unexpected one. Brands use this technique, for example, in advertising campaigns with gamification.
A person completes game tasks, receives a gift and continues to participate in order to win another prize. The anticipation of the reward and the joy of receiving it make the client stay in contact with the product for a long time.

Benefits of Neuromarketing

• Deep understanding of customers. Neuromarketing can study human behavior in more detail than traditional marketing research, which evaluates conscious consumer behavior, such as through surveys and focus groups.
• Neuromarketing uses data that cannot be quantified, so it allows for precise study of consumer behavior, preferences, and interests. This information helps to understand how a person feels and how they might react to a communication or product.
• Honest feedback. In the context of neuromarketing, customers cannot lie, so the data collected is more reliable. If you simply ask a person what he thinks about something, he may lie or express his emotions incorrectly. Neuromarketing provides objective results that traditional customer satisfaction research cannot provide.
• Subconscious Answers. Neuromarketing allows you to uncover the depths of the subconscious and get answers that people are usually not aware of.
  Integrated Strategy. Neuromarketing is used in combination with traditional methods for a more holistic approach to marketing research.

Criticism of neuromarketing

• Expensive research. Comprehensive tests in a scientific neuromarketing lab are usually only available to large brands - they are expensive to conduct.
• Small sample. Due to the high cost of research, marketers usually involve a small number of participants - from 10 to 30 subjects. Such a sample cannot be called representative, it has a fairly large margin of error.
• Manipulativeness. Some experts warn that neuromarketing tools help companies manipulate consumers — instilling in them feelings and emotions that will encourage purchase.

The attitude towards neuromarketing is currently ambiguous.

On the one hand, it does allow companies to improve their products, make them more attractive to customers and, as a result, sell more.

But on the other hand, the very fact that corporations have access to the subconscious of their customers and receive information that people are unable to hide allows us to talk about the unethical nature of neuromarketing.

Where is neuromarketing used?

• New product creation and design development. Neuromarketing research answers the question of what kind of packaging is best to choose, what color it should be, what words to write on it, and what to draw. You will be able to find out how the audience perceives a particular combination of design elements and what needs to be improved to increase sales.
• Advertising testing. You can check the effectiveness of advertising before it goes on air. Neuromarketing allows a company to understand what the audience's reaction to videos or images will be: whether the advertising evokes the desired impressions, whether it stimulates purchases, whether it will be successful.
• Increase sales. Neuromarketing research suggests how to work with customers to better meet their needs and, therefore, increase sales.
• Merchandising: Brain signal and eye gaze research provide information on where to best position products to attract attention and how to stimulate impulse purchases.
• Pricing: The most attractive price can be chosen using neuromarketing data.
• Marketing research. Neuromarketing provides opportunities for deep study of the target audience, understanding its true desires and motives. Data on the reasons for consumer behavior and irrational actions of people then form the basis for segmentation, business marketing strategy and advertising campaigns.

Let's sum it up

1. Neuromarketing is a relatively new field of knowledge that is a symbiosis of marketing, psychology and neurobiology. It studies unconscious human reactions.
2. Neuromarketers study brain signals, as well as involuntary reactions of the body - the direction of gaze, increased breathing, heart rate, changes in blood pressure, skin temperature and much more.
3. Research shows that the buyer is influenced by all the factors that he receives through the channels of perception of information - these are sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. In addition, the brain creates so-called cognitive distortions, which can also be used to influence customers.
4. Neuromarketing is also used to evaluate advertising and products before the project is launched and entered the market. That is, the main areas of application of neuromarketing now are design development, creation of advertising materials and sales increase.
5. The research itself is expensive. Only large brands can afford it. Small and medium-sized business researchers use the already known results of neuromarketing — conduct experiments on them, do A/B tests and determine the most effective tools.