Author: Lorenzo D’Amore
In today's global market, we are faced with an infinite number of possible purchases. What makes us, as consumers, choose one product or service over another? What is behind our purchasing choices?
Recently, scholars have discovered that 95% of our purchasing choices stem fromirrational factors that we cannot control, such as emotions, intuitions and memories,which lead us to prefer a certain product, service or brand over another. In today's competitive scenario, where the vast world of marketing is constantly evolving, it becomes essential that there is a science that deals with these causes to determine a brand's success. This science exists and is called Neuromarketing, a discipline that combines the worlds of psychology and marketing. In this article, we will focus more on the concept of neuromarketing, trying to explain how this new discipline can manage to enter the minds of consumers’, anticipating their choices in the market.
What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing makes use of scientific research of our brains and aims to discover what happens in our brains in response to stimuli related to products, brands and advertising, with the aim of determining strategies that push us towards a purchase. Basically, through this discipline, the aim is to deduce that to sell more we need to leverage our emotions.
But how does this happen?
An example of this is a very modern marketing method: sensory marketing. It consists of stimulating our five senses to arouse an emotion within the buyer in such a way as to create a memorable shopping experience that is directly related to a particular brand. For example, large clothing shops have noticed that filling a room with vanilla perfume in a women's clothing shop even sells twice as much merchandise. This also increases customer loyalty, as they will link those feelings to a particular brand. So a whole emotional sphere will be created around that brand, composed of all our five senses, and not only composed of sight. So it will be important:
The choice of colours (visual sphere)
The choice of music (auditory sphere)
The choice of perfume (olfactory sphere)
What are the most common applications of neuromarketing?
We have seen how consumers often make non-rational purchases even though they are not aware of it. Therefore, in order to better understand consumer preferences, over the last few years many companies have developed a number of neuromarketing techniques and tools, such as:
Eye tracking, a technology that allows the tracking and precise detection of a subject's eye movements, in order to understand where their attention is focused while browsing, for example, a website
Heat maps, a data visualization technique to analyze where the user's gaze lingers the longest on a website or e-commerce site, and thus to understand what attracts the consumer the most
Electroencephalograms, with which to analyze which areas of our brain are activated during the presentation of a new product or the viewing of a video or advertisement.
Pepsi VS Coca Cola: the first neuromarketing experiment
But how did neuromarketing come about? To explain this, we have to mention the most famous neuromarketing experiment in history, namely ‘Pepsi vs. Coke’. In 1975, Pepsi executives decided to conduct an experiment between their drink and Coke to really understand consumer preferences, thus creating the “Pepsi challenge”: a blind test in which people were invited to take a sip of both drinks, without being aware of which brand they were trying. Want to know who won the challenge? Pepsi.
Despite the success of this blind test, Pepsi's market share was half that of Coca Cola. So why did people prefer Pepsi to Coke? One of the first answers Pepsi executives gave themselves concerned the sweeter taste and flavour of their drink compared to Coke, which was pleasant to taste, but more difficult and possibly nauseating when tasting a whole can.
But the definite answer came only several years later, in 2003 to be precise, through an experiment held at Baylor College in Houston by Professor Reid Montague. In this experiment, people were involved who, by means of an MRI scan, could taste both drinks. The first part of the test was done in the dark like the famous Pepsi challenge of 1975.
People did not know which of the two drinks they were tasting and when they tasted Pepsi, an area of our brain that is connected to pleasure and taste processing lit up in the MRI machine. So they actually liked Pepsi better. However, the truth was revealed in the second part of the test, when people were aware of which drink they were consuming. When people drank Coke, a part of the brain related to emotions was activated and came to prefer it. Researchers at the University of Houston had realized that our purchases are conditioned by the ability of companies to create in our minds an idea, image or concept that is more appealing, captivating and different from competitors.
What does this experiment teach us?
The products that are liked the most do not win, but those that are perceived as etter. In fact, between the perception of the brand and the actual enjoyment of the drink, the former prevailed in the end.
In order to be preferred in the market, one has to work on the brand because it has the power to simplify the choice and influence the purchase decision.
A brand is not built just with colours, a brand name or a nice advertisement, but by positioning it for clear and decisive attributes for the final purchase.
The most relevant discipline in the creation of a brand is brand positioning: so if you want to differentiate yourself to get into people's minds, the strategy to start with is definitely brand positioning.
The future prospects of neuromarketing
Digital transformation is profoundly affecting all sectors, including market research. In the future, a massive collection of neuromarketing data, obtained from the physiological information provided by wearable devices, is expected to be combined in real time with vast behavioral data. With this real-time data availability and advances in artificial intelligence, immediate insights will be possible, paving the way for new, highly personalized forms of customer interaction and the ability to be present at the right time and with the right product. However, to get to this future, there are still many challenges to overcome, both technologically, socially and ethically.
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