Neuromarketing

What Is Neuromarketing? How to Use It in Your Marketing Strategy

The human brain houses many thoughts and emotions.

Neuromarketing is one of the ways to analyze these sentiments and

understand customer behavior. The neuromarketing market is
expected to reach $21,218 million by 2030, growing at a compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9%. Many people remain unaware of
precisely what neuromarketing is despite major companies utilizing it in
one way or another.

While neuroscience has been around for decades, marketers today

turn to several tactics that use psychology to influence human
behavior. Neuromarketing applies to businesses seeking to improve
their communication, plus it helps consumers make better purchasing
choices and form new habits.

Let’s start with the basic definition of neuromarketing before digging

deeper into how it impacts purchasing behavior.

What is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing studies how the brain responds to marketing.

Neuromarketing is a way of creating content, like websites, logos, and

social media material, that evokes an emotional reaction in the brain. It
helps brands understand more about their customers by tapping into
what drives them to make purchases and segmenting
them accordingly. These insights make it easier for brands to decide
on future marketing efforts by tuning into consumers’
subconsciousness.

Neuromarketing is a real field of scientific study. Companies like Time

Warner and NBC have used it for years to measure customer
engagement. With the help of researchers from Microsoft's
neuroscience group and Google Brain, Facebook has recently
examined its users’ brains while they scroll through their news feeds.

While it may seem straightforward, measuring how a person’s brain

responds to a product involves capturing images of their brain while
experiencing the product. But using neuromarketing, businesses can
learn fascinating and complex information about the way a customer's
subconscious mind influences their decision to buy from you. And they
won't even know it.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and

electroencephalography (EEG), neuromarketing tracks brain activity,
so businesses better understand their customers.

As people are presented with various images and sounds, fMRI

measures blood flow in the brain by monitoring changes in magnetic
fields produced by atoms. fMRI and EEG have each established their
own respective roles in advertising research by providing different
information about how the brain reacts to ads.
Understanding the Primal
Brain
According to Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize winner
in Economic Sciences, we have two brains. The rational brain only
influences our decisions, but the primal unconscious brain drives
attention, trust, memorization, and intuition.

The primal brain is mainly responsible for decision-making; we

have that in common with all animals. On the other hand, the rational
brain becomes active after decisions have been made, describing and
justifying them.

The primal brain consists of 6 stimuli – and marketers need to trigger

these to communicate their message properly.

 Personal: Mainly concerned with our survival and well-being.

Think of focusing on your audience’s pain points and how you
can solve them.
 Contrastable: Accelerates decision-making. Marketers can
make their ads contrastable to reduce cognitive effort by
providing easy choice options to customers.
 Tangible: Looks for something familiar, friendly, and instantly
recognizable. Marketers can use concrete evidence, familiar
terms, patterns, and situations to make automatically tangible ad
messages.
 Memorable: Forgets most information, so marketers should
create messages with a strong beginning and ending to generate
attention and retention.
 Visual: Responds strongly to visuals and makes decisions
quickly. Marketers should create visually appealing marketing
material that captures and captivates their base.
  Emotional: Designed to trigger decisions. Emotional marketing
greatly affects the primal brain through memorable messages.

How brain activity

influences consumer
behavior
Imagine browsing through an e-commerce website with thousands of
products and hundreds of categories. What would you choose and
why? Your brain plays the main role in influencing our decision-
making.

There’s a reason why stores put up large, bright-colored neon signs.

They want to attract your attention in a way that makes you go inside
the store instead of gazing through windows from the outside.

Many businesses implementing neuromarketing use marketing

strategies backed by psychological research to see how their
advertisements perform. For example, designers consider color
psychology when choosing color palettes. Small, subtle changes affect
consumer perceptions and buying behavior. Consider these:

 People tend to choose healthy, nutritious food options when

displayed on the left side of the menu.
 Large spaces in luxury stores are related to high social status.
 Removing dollar signs from pricing can increase sales.

Some important psychological factors influencing consumer behavior

are:
  Motivation: Basic needs and security necessities can motivate a
consumer to purchase products and services.
 Perception: Customers develop an impression about products
based on ads, reviews, or social media feedback. This
perception plays a significant role in influencing buying
decisions.
 Learning: Customers use products to learn more about them.
This factor helps them to repeat their purchasing decision or
consider switching to another brand.
 Attitudes and beliefs: Customers have certain attitudes and
beliefs that make them behave in certain ways toward a product.
These feelings play a major role in defining the brand image of a
product.

7 messaging components
that appeal to the primal
brain
Once you know what motivates and excites customers to take action,
engaging them becomes relatively easy. Use these messaging
components to address your customers.

1. Fear of missing out

No one wants to be left out, after all. No wonder 69% of
millennials experience FOMO.

Generally, people have a hard time making purchasing decisions

because they feel they can get their hands on something better.
FOMO, or the fear of missing out, exploits a classic human psychology
loophole by making us believe that we'll lose something amazing if we
don't act fast.

This is where marketers leverage FOMO in their marketing

campaigns to create a sense of anxiety, which makes people believe
they won’t get a great deal if they don’t make speedy decisions. You’ve
heard the phrases: “Limited time offer!” “Act now!” “These will sell
out!”

2. Social proof
Imagine you're shopping for a new coffee table. You find two that you
like based on their pictures alone. One has over 600 reviews and an
average 4-star rating; the other only has 100 reviews and a poor rating
of 2 stars. Which one would you pick?

You’d likely go with the first one because over 600 people have
purchased it, and enough of those people liked it enough to bring its
rating to 4 stars. Why did you make this purchasing decision? Because
of a psychological phenomenon called social proof.

Wikipedia describes social proof as “a psychological phenomenon

where people assume the action of others in an attempt to reflect
correct behavior for a given situation.”

This buying behavior happens when potential buyers are unsure of

what to do. That’s why marketers use social proof from existing
customers, such as reviews, recommendations, or awards, to instill a
sense of assurance in potential customers’ minds. They feel safe
buying a particular product because others have already given it a
thumbs up.
3. Ego reinforcement
Marketing makes customers think about a product or service in a
certain way. While many of Sigmund Freud's theories have been
disproven by modern psychology, the three-part structure of his
model of id, ego, and superego remains influential.

 ID is the primitive and instinctive part of the unconscious mind

that contains all urges and impulses.
 Ego is the rational decision-making part of the conscious
personality.
 Superego is the unconscious voice of conscience and the
source of self-criticism.

The best sales copywriters acknowledge that you have to first talk to
the id to sell to the ego. As a result, they always write to the ids of their
target audience, making efforts to appeal to primitive drives.

Freud's theory also validates that a product's visual, tactile, and

auditory attributes trigger consumers' emotional responses, which
motivate them to make purchase decisions.

4. Desire to avoid “status quo bias”

The status quo bias refers to our preference for retaining things over
changing them. People are averse to change and will avoid losing what
they already have.

Why do people behave this way?

Because they view change as expensive, unsafe, and risky. If the

perceived benefits of a new product don’t outweigh the perceived costs
of changing their existing product, they’d rather continue to tread the
same path they’re on.

Status quo bias comprises preference stability, selection difficulty, cost

of change, and anticipated regret and blame. In a sales and marketing
context, showcasing your brand like everyone else will only reinforce
your buyer’s status quo bias.

You need to tell a powerful, disruptive story that persuades your

prospects to lean toward staying the course versus changing.
Convince them that their current situation is doing them more harm
than good and that they should change to a better solution to achieve
their objectives.

5. Approval from a credible authority

figure
Big brands choose celebrity figures from different fields as their brand
ambassadors to apply the authority principle to marketing. Marketing
has always been about authority. Think of Lionel Messi for Pepsi,
Michael Jordan for Nike, or David Beckham for Georgio Armani.

The authority principle refers to a human tendency to comply with

those in control since people believe those positions have the most
knowledge and power. Brands use authority figures to establish their
products’ credibility in the market. People think buying and using those
products will yield favorable results because renowned, successful
people recommend using them.

Customers trust expert opinions to guide them in their purchase

decisions.
6. Sentimentality
Marketers should make no mistake - sentiment can make or break a
brand.

Consumers form their feelings toward a product based on how it

makes them feel. It’s the emotional connection between brands and
customers that acts as a catalyst in the choices we make.

Remember how you bought a certain product only because the

salesman in the shop was so courteous to you, or because that
product’s look and feel made you happy. We strive to be happy and
are willing to pay for things that make us feel good.

Marketers should aim to provoke strong positive feelings to garner

attention to their products or service and boost sales.

7. “Less is more” approach

Faced with many choices, too much information, and brand jargon,
consumers often feel overwhelmed about what to choose – and what
to skip. As a result, they make bad decisions, or worse, no decisions at
all. Think of thousands of advertisements doing the same thing - buy,
buy, buy! This traditional advertising strategy has become repetitive
and fails to interest consumers.

Since COVID-19, we’ve changed as a society. The minimalist trend is

everywhere. We’re beginning to question how much we need, and
many of us are deciding on “just enough” instead of “one of each”.

We prefer simple, minimal design copy over flash and glamor

advertisements.
We think before we act
The human brain is an incredibly dynamic organ. It’s constantly
absorbing information and filing it away for later use, or coming up with
new ways to process that information for future use. Whether useful to
us in the present, the brain never stops analyzing that information.

So the next time you see someone do something strange or

remarkable, remember that it may be a product of their subconscious
brain activity.

At the intersection of psychology and marketing lies true brand

experience. Neuromarketing is an incredibly effective approach to brand

engagement and a crucial component for staying competitive in a

crowded digital world.