What is neuromarketing and what is it for?
Neuromarketing is concerned with the processes that take place in the human brain during purchase and selection. And more importantly, with how these can be influenced, for example by your online marketing agency.
Its aim is to understand how the consumer’s brain works and what influences and tools can be used to ensure that advertising messages and digital marketing are most effective in reaching the consumer.
Less effort = greater success in online marketing
It’s important to note that this is not just another marketing fad, a tool like influencer marketing or chatbots. Instead this is a field of research backed by scientific studies that can help us marketers. It is an approach that aims to explore consumer preferences, motivations and expectations, to determine consumer behaviour and the success and failure of specific advertising and online marketing messages.
With neuromarketing, you can rethink your strategy and market smarter. Using fewer resources (work, time, money) to be more effective. And you’ll get lower click-through rates, more customers, more readers, more subscribers, less money spent in the wrong places, more revenue. Plus, you can say you’re marketing smarter than 80% of the market, where marketers’ toolboxes go as far as saying, “product on sale, let’s do a Facebook ad for it”. One is enough because the boss will leave you alone, the job is done.
In fact, neuromarketing can be the R&D of the digital marketing agency. It’s helping professionals experiment with what design or communication message will help their product to be more likely to be taken off the shelf by potential customers. A well-timed and science-based message can be a million-dollar item for a large company, says Ákos Varga, a domestic researcher on the topic.
How does neuromarketing measure the brain?
Neuromarketing research has several tools, one of the most common being fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. This actually allows us to monitor the brain in real time, for example while shopping. Thus we can see how the brain reacts when we buy a pair of shoes or pay for a clutch change at the garage. I’ll tell you: in the same way as when we feel intense pain, like when we burn ourselves or when we bang our toe on the corner of the bed frame.
Another common method is EEG, or electroencephalography, this measures the immediate response to stimuli. While in the case of fMRI, for example, we can monitor the brain’s increased oxygen uptake, taking into account the 5-second delay after the stimulus (Ákos Varga).
In most of these studies, the use of several tools, such as a combination of eye camera and EEG, is used as much as possible to obtain more accurate results.
But what are the practical benefits when used by a digital marketing agency?
Fortunately, you don’t have to become a researcher and use expensive tools to study your consumers’ reactions. You just need to take some basic research findings and have your online marketing agency apply them. It’s worth it, because you can see significant results in the short term.
Consumers like to believe that what they do is always reasonable. That their decisions are logical, deliberate, well thought out. The reality is that even if there are rational elements to a customer’s decision, there is growing evidence that our choices are driven primarily by our subconscious. (For more on this topic, I recommend Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational.) How irrational? Quite a lot. According to Gerald Zaltmann (who is a researcher at Harward), 95% of our thoughts, emotions and learning processes take place without us being consciously aware of them.
So talk to that 95% in your digital marketing. I’m not saying you have to be irrational and unreasonable, but put your unconscious and emotions first. In this article I show you 10 practical examples of how.
The devil’s game, manipulation
Some people see the devil himself in neuromarketing and related marketing psychology. After all it’s using scientific methods in online marketing to influence people’s decisions and behaviour. I disagree. In the same way that many devices can be dangerous in uninitiated or malicious hands. Think of a car: just because someone causes an accident while driving drunk, does not mean that the device itself is dangerous and harmful. Used ethically & intelligently – which is the responsibility of every digital marketing agency – advertising can make products better and customers more satisfied. So work with ethical online marketing agency.
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Sources:
- Varga Ákos – Simon Judit – Horváth Dóra – Pintér Attila: Az érzelmek és az agy –fókuszban a neuromarketing kutatás
- Roger Dooley: Brainfluence
- https://pszichoforyou.hu/neuromarketing-a-hirdetok-mar-az-agyunkban-vannak/
http://www.digitalhungary.hu/konferenciak/media-hungary/Mi-az-a-neuromarketing/1969/
https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/neuromarketing
https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/home
