Most often, people like to go with the crowd. Consumers in general start having common opinions. However, some people do this to avoid any kind of weirdness too. This is the reason why people like giving opinions that are acceptable too. For instance, you may find an advertisement very funny. However, your friend might find it very vulgar. To avoid being looked down on, you might also say that the ad is vulgar. This is exactly what neuromarketing challenges.

Marketing is a practice which requires knowing the audience. The person trying to sell must know his buyer. He will not be able to sell anything if he doesn’t know his audience at all. However, it is also very important to know your audience’s true self. Only after knowing what actually attracts your customer can you make the perfect ad.

What Is Neuromarketing? 

This is a new form of marketing in comparison to the rest. However, it is very impactful. It uses neuroscience to determine consumer behaviour. Neuroscience is the science of your brain. However, it focuses more on that part which isn’t controllable. This is done by studying consumer reactions and responses to various stimuli. This stimulus is marketing based and includes your campaigns and designs. Therefore, The effect is quite powerful. This is because one can see results without too much effort as well.

The process is simple. You bring in a group of participants and make them respond to different things. These things can be any aspect of your company that you wish to improve on. For instance, the logo. You can see and study the brain pattern of people in response to different colours. People do respond differently to different colours. Therefore, there are reasons behind using different colours in different situations. This is exactly how this type of marketing works. Therefore, it is also called consumer neuroscience.

The Importance and Benefits of Neuromarketing 

There is no doubt that people find neuromarketing very controversial. However, it has its own benefits too. Here are some of its benefits:

• Companies can identify the emotional responses of customers. They are able to get honest responses. Therefore, brands 
• make customers react to various ads and campaigns. They study these reactions to come up with the best strategies.
• As mentioned, this helps you get way more information about your customer. Therefore, companies can actually come up with very different and unique strategies.
• It definitely helps improve brand advertisements. It can also help with the product designs as well as packaging.
• It actually helps a company serve the customer well. Therefore, the brand is able to connect more with their desires and needs. 
• Not a lot of companies make use of it. Therefore, it can help your company gain an edge over the others. It makes your brand do things very differently than others
• If a company is able to connect well, this means that sales have gone up. Therefore, it also helps bring in revenue and increase sales.
• Finally, it helps provide a smooth customer experience. You end up providing an experience that a user will love. Therefore, it helps satisfy users.

Pros and Cons

Neuromarketing comes with both advantages as well as disadvantages. The advantages of this form of marketing are:

• Reliable: This type of marketing actually reaches the brain of the customer. It connects with that part of the brain which you don’t control. Therefore, the results of this marketing are way better and more reliable. 
• Fill blind spots: the common methods of marketing cannot be as accurate as this method. They give a much better understanding of a customer. They help you get a better idea about their behaviour pattern too.
• Emotions: It helps make the connection between your products and a customer’s emotions about them.  Receiving emotional feedback is way better than feedback that may not be truthful. Therefore, this helps in improvement too.

The disadvantages are:

• Not ethical: Many people are of the opinion that this way is not ethical. It is because people are actually trying to tap into the brains of customers. This also has concerns about data privacy. 
• Expensive: the equipment used to carry out such experiments is costly. Therefore, it can become a problem if there are no valid results or returns. However, if the results actually help, this could be a great value for money.

How to Do Neuromarketing 

Neuromarketing involves a lot of scientific terms. This is because it deals with medical experiments. It is completely based on research. However, This research comes from medical experiments on a group of people. Certain tools are used to scan the brains of people. These tools help identify the brain signals to different ads or things presented to them. The response of the brain is exactly what helps companies craft strategies. 

For instance, a company is about to launch a new advertisement in the market. However, it contains some elements which may make it tacky. So you pick a group of people. Show this ad to them and track their brain activity while watching it. Brain activity is later studied by researchers to help figure out the best action. This scanning is not just a random brain scan. It tracks a lot more such as your facial expressions, your eyes and even your emotions! It is from these responses that companies make changes. They try to improve their design and content in a way that the customer responds best to it. Therefore, this is how neuromarketing works!

Top 4 Strategies to Create Subliminal Messages 

There are actually a lot of techniques that go into this. Here are ways to apply neuromarketing:

• Facial coding: This helps figure out various human emotions. This will help you know how your customer feels while watching the ad or design. Various human emotions can be surveyed using this. 
• Biometrics: This has to do a lot with skin. One can understand whether their ad is engaging the customer or not through this. This is dependent on things like your skin conductance and heart rate.
• Gaze: this is your typical tracking of the eye. Using this, you can actually make a lot of design improvements. Be it the colours or the fonts you use. This also helps with web designing and packaging.
• Pupillometry: this helps you figure out responses based on eye movements. This is also a way of understanding customer engagement. It is an easy as well as budget-friendly technique.
• fMRI: This is a very costly method to capture emotional responses. In addition, This method also requires a lab. People use this method to help with customer engagement and branding. However, this actually figures out the flow of blood during activity.

Top 5 Neuromarketing Examples 

Here are some good examples:

• Chips Ahoy: this cookie brand did use this type of marketing to reach its audience. They conducted their research. However, they realised that customers had issues with their packaging. They were actually unable to read anything well on the package. This was due to the wrong colours being used. Therefore, the company used eye-tracking to find the answer. The company used this result to change their colours, text and design.

• Cheetos: An ad was first shown to focus groups. This ad showed a prank being played on a woman. Here, her white laundry was being filled with orange Cheetos. Obviously, the focus groups showed their dislike for the ad. This was an expected response because no one wanted to come off as rude. However, when an EEG study was done using the same people. They actually liked it and found the ad funny. Therefore, using this one can know about a customer’s hidden likes. 

• Web designs: As part of the research, few researchers came up with different web designs. These web designs were later shown to a set of people. Each web design was different and had different elements. They were also asked to judge the store’s credibility and quality based on the design. Most people actually felt that the web designs that had extra effort were credible.

• Audio-visual: Many people think that videos are more impactful than audio. However, this research showed different results. Researchers took the same audio and video scenes from GOT. They made a set of people watch and listen. They found the video more interesting. However, the audiobook showed high body temperature as well as pulse rate in the audience.

In Conclusion

All in all, neuromarketing is simple yet complicated. Many people call this technique manipulative. Some people also call it unethical. However, for marketers, it is simply a way of knowing a customer well. It helps get a very deep understanding of any customer. This technique isn’t new. Researchers and psychologists have used it to determine a lot about human behaviour. It is just seeing its application in marketing now.

What are your thoughts about neuromarketing? Do you think it is right for people to market their products based on this? Let us know in the comments section below.