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The combination of neuroscience (the scientific study of the nervous system) and marketing (the activity of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising) creates neuromarketing. But, do you really know what it is and what is it for? This practice wants to know how the human brain behaves during the buying process, its reaction to an ad campaign and how the final decision to buy a singular product among everything available is made.
For starters, have you ever realized how, every time there is a red sign in a store, we run towards it without looking back because we know the price will have a discount? Maybe you have noticed that, whenever we go grocery shopping or we enter a big Swedish decoration store, time seems to stretch and stretch? And don’t you think the baker’s always smells like freshly made bread, even though they bake everything early in the morning?
Almost every business is implementing neuromarketing techniques nowadays to increase sales by deciphering their customer’s conducts. And that’s because we all make decisions based on subconscious causes instead of logic reasoning.
What is the goal of neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing’s main goal is to get to know our target better.
Focusing on emotions and subconscious responses, neuromarketing will study how we are affected by certain stimuli during the whole purchasing process. However, neuromarketing does not rely on personal subjectivity but quantitative real aspects.
So, by understanding what our customer likes, we will be able to improve their experience on many different levels, even our products and services will learn something from it! Easy and simple, right?
How to use neuromarketing techniques
With the focal point aiming to brain responses to certain stimuli, neuromarketing techniques can address three different aspects:
Attention
Neuromarketing explains how the brand is going to be able to catch the audience’s eye. Even though it might sound complicated, it is vital to attract their attention so they can start thinking about buying our product. It does not matter if we have the best device there is, for example, if our targeted audience does not know we exist… we won’t be able to sell it at all!
Emotion
After this first impression, we must be able to move the crowd, emotionally speaking. It is undeniable that an excited audience will show greater predisposition to choose us as their next supplier than a group of people we didn’t touch at all!
Memory
If attention was properly paid and emotion was effective, our potential customer will remember us and our product, so it will be easier to become their choice now or in the near future.
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Neuromarketing and its future
Neuromarketing is set to do great things in the future because every business out there wants to make an impact, and every individual would love to find exactly what they want while entering into an immersive experience designed just for them. It is ideal, right?
To be able to squeeze neuromarketing techniques’ potential to its top, technology is key. It will have a revolutionary role in neuromarketing’s future, developing devices that will study behaviours without the sample even realising they are being tested. Virtual reality and AI, such viral concepts nowadays, will play an essential role too. Both technological currents will create fictional environments and reasoning in real time to analyse human’s response in a million situations at a time. It reads crazy, we know, but everything is possible in the multiverse. 😉
Neuromarketing’s future is closely related to nanotechnology, which will soon make nanomarketing the new trend!
Neuromarketing techniques
Your customer’s experience, before and after making their decision, is as important as your product itself. That’s why our target’s feelings and emotions must be the common denominator to our action plans and sales strategies if we want our company to be ambitious.
There are three big groups of neuromarketing techniques that form sensory marketing:
Eyesight
Once they like how we look, half the job is done! Everything we see and how we see it has an impact on our decisions. Neuromarketing studies how colours, wording and product order definitely influence one’s final decision. This way, a product with a 19.99€ price tag will for sure get better numbers than the same one with a 20€ tag, and it is clearly not because the 0.01€ price difference but the feeling of buying the most economic option.
Hearing
Through our hearing senses and everything we listen to, neuromarketing is able to explain how we, as customers, feel a certain feeling like happiness, rejection, stress or relaxation… and how it will impact on our decision-making process. Music, for example, has a great influence in our behaviour and holds even greater power on us. And not only sound, but also the lack of it. Neuromarketing also studies silence and its own effect on our conduct. Silence is a resource often used in advertising campaigns to attract attention effectively.
Kinaesthetic
Our eyes and ears are not the only ones able to catch information. Through smell, taste and touch we are constantly receiving useful information that our brain examines and deciphers. This data is even more effective than what we see and hear, especially in physical experiences.
Neuromarketing experts state that this information is greatly emotional and personal, so it is harder to manipulate. It is very difficult to find a smell that pleases everyone for, let’s say, a clothing store. However, those customers that got captivated by that specific smell will be given to come back again, not only because they liked the product, but for the experience.
Now you all know what neuromarketing is, we are sure you’ll be able to tell when a business is using one of these techniques! We have already fallen for a few, not gonna lie!
“I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”
Arthur Conan Doyle