In the fast-growing modern world, new concepts and ideas are emerging regularly in different fields. For example, digital marketing has evolved as a revolutionary marketing discipline to keep pace and align with the digital world.

However, another crucial wing of marketing is neuromarketing, a comparatively new discipline that combines concepts from marketing and neuroscience or psychology. Despite providing effective marketing strategies, the concept is still unknown to many. This article takes you to the core of it.

What is Neuromarketing?

As said earlier, neuromarketing aims to bring neuroscience and marketing together. According to Harvard Business Review, neuromarketing refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas.

Difference between Traditional Marketing and Neuromarketing

In the simplest words, traditional marketing tries to understand a consumer’s decision-making process from a conscious viewpoint, whereas neuromarketing aims to understand a consumer’s psychological behaviour. According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchase decisions take place unconsciously.

Marketers can’t blindly rely on consumer surveys or focus groups. It’s because of cognitive dissonance- a concept that customers may believe or prefer something consciously while they may choose to buy something else subconsciously. So, neuromarketing comes out to be more effective as it directly deals with consumer behaviour.

Why Is It Essential for Modern Marketers?

Neuromarketing is more important than ever because it’s difficult for marketers to get their audience’s attention in the first place. Breaking through the clutter is becoming increasingly difficult, and marketers are now searching for a new advantage.

Neuroscientific research helps marketers to understand their target audience better than the target audience can understand themselves. This leads to better marketing tactics and increased sales. So, it has been quite essential for modern marketers to know about neuromarketing.

Pros and Cons of Neuromarketing

There are arguments for and against the neuromarketing concept.

Pros of Neuromarketing are-

1. Neuromarketing provides a more granular look at human behaviour than traditional market research.
2. These methods generate more reliable data.
3. Neuromarketing can lower the price and increase the value of marketing research.
4. It can reveal insights into the subconscious mind and short responses that people generally do not remember.
5. Neuromarketing is paired with traditional methods for a more holistic approach to marketing research.

Cons of Neuromarketing are-

1. It may generalize personal cases and introduce bias into the results.
2. There’s no absolute connection between the marketing stimuli and the emotions triggered.
3. Reactions observed in a lab test environment may be different than they would be in an actual buying environment.
4. It is manipulative.
5. Neuromarketing is often conflated with pseudoscience and hype and is not backed by credible neuroscientific claims.

Tools of Neuromarketing

The followings are some popular neuromarketing techniques:

1. EEG (Electroencephalography):A test used to detect abnormalities related to the brain’s electrical activity. The test is conducted with small discs placed on the scalp, which send signals to a computer to track results.
2. FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging):A functional neuroimaging procedure using MRI technology that measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.
3. Eye-tracking.
4. SST (Steady State Topography):A methodology for observing and measuring human brain activity.
5. Galvanic Skin Response:The response of the human body that causes electrical variations on the skin.

Neuromarketing To Grow Your Business

Any marketing strategy aims to promote products and ultimately increase sales to grow the business. How can neuromarketing do the job?

To get the job done, you should structure all your ad campaigns in a way that tells a story that evokes emotions.

According to Influencive, Dr. Ken Blanchard found medical tests, such as EEG and fMRI, effective in helping shed light on how brand influences the decision to buy. It means you can design a customer service system that has already been proven viable to ensure that any potential buyer turns into a loyal customer.

eBay effectively utilized the neuromarketing technique. Neuro-Focus developed a massively successful brand identity for eBay based on tests done on consumers that measured their emotional responses.

In a new study by One to One Interactive’s OTO Insights, search results that included texts, videos, and images were more emotionally engaging and memorable to customers.

According to Roger Dooley, a neuromarketing expert, the inclusion of videos and images in texts significantly boosts moral engagement during interaction with a SERP. This study proves that most Internet users get instant gratification from landing pages with many images and videos. This is how neuromarketing is utilized to grow business.

Future of Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing has become a reliable and effective alternative to other growth-hacking techniques. Neuromarketing can be used successfully in collaboration with virtual reality (VR) in the future. Although its hype didn’t last for long in the past, it has great potential for the future.

Written By: Ariful Hasan Shuvo