What is neuromarketing and what is it used for?
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January 28, 2019
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Marketing Digital
To increase their sales, companies have had to develop techniques and devise strategies that allow them to connect both rationally and emotionally with their potential buyers. The great achievement that marketing has achieved has to do with first understanding how the brain of buyers works in each of the stages of the buyer's journey in order to analyze their psyche in greater detail, a fundamental principle of neuromarketing .
By understanding how the human brain works, it is much easier to know how to market a product and/or service successfully. In light of the social theories surrounding how consumer societies behave, neuromarketing is nothing more than a technique that is much more specialized in understanding how these purchasing needs are produced and what stimuli are behind them.
At the same time, companies have realized that to reach consumers they must connect with their experiences, values, feelings and emotions, so as a result of this reality, neuromarketing takes on great importance as a science that investigates and studies how the brain behaves when faced with a desire to consume.
Neuromarketing is a word composed of two terms :
Neuro : which refers to neuroscience and the study of the brain) and
Marketing : (to the discipline that is responsible for studying markets and consumers). In this sense, neuromarketing is nothing more than a science that is applied to marketing techniques. It is based on studies related to brain processes and how they are triggered by certain consumer stimuli.
Neuromarketing seeks to measure neuronal activities when there is exposure to campaigns, advertisements and other marketing strategies with the aim of explaining people's behavior based on their neurobiological activity. But what exactly is measured? This science focuses its study on three key aspects: attention , emotion and memory .
In other words, neuromarketing captures indicators of neurological, psychological and physiological content, which can incorporate both the electrical activity of the brain and the movements that a person may have, their body language, their features.
When did neuromarketing emerge?
Neuromarketing as a union between science and various marketing techniques was born in 1990. The first studies on this area of knowledge occurred in the United States when Professor Gerald Zaltman, a doctor and researcher at Harvard University, used magnetic resonance imaging devices not for medical purposes, but for marketing purposes.
Later, companies such as Coca-Cola and Ford began to hire research centers to conduct market studies using biometrics . Biometrics consists of applying statistical methods and calculations to the study of biological phenomena. However, it was not until 2002 that the expression “neuromarketing” was first coined by marketing professor Ale Smidts, belonging to Erasmus University in Holland. That same year, SalesBrain , the first neuromarketing company, was founded and the following year the first academic study called “ Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks ” was published .
In this study, subjects were asked to drink either Coca-Cola or Pepsi while their brains were monitored with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The study recorded how different parts of the brain wer poland number for whatsapp e activated depending on whether the subject knew or did not know which brand they were drinking. By 2012, the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association (NMSBA) was founded, an organization responsible for conducting research related to neuromarketing and its relevance today.
Why study the brain?
Although surveys and focus groups are among the most popular qualitative techniques for conducting market research, neither method is always reliable, since the people being interviewed can alter their answers. In other words, there are factors that can influence their responses, such as wanting to please the researcher or trying to give the “correct” answer instead of the true one.
In this way, neuromarketing is based on the premise that there are no secrets in the brain. A person could say that they like a product, but in their mind, they could be thinking the exact opposite. So this technique is ideal for obtaining real data about what a person really thinks and feels. Studying how the brain behaves in this decision-making process is essential for analyzing the best moment to promote a sale.
Neuromarketing is also concerned with understanding the activities of the unconscious, since 69% of purchasing decisions, mainly within a B2C market, are made unconsciously and take around 2.5 seconds.
What is neuromarketing for?
Neuromarketing can be applied in different ways :
Evaluate a product before its launch.
Create a successful pricing strategy.
Determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
Create appropriate content for each stage of the purchasing process.
Evaluate an audience's reaction to certain visual stimuli (colors, images, texts).
Identify which areas of the brain are activated in the purchasing process.
Optimize the customer experience.
Act on people's emotional experience and memory.
What is the importance of neuromarketing?
The more we understand the factors that influence consumer decision-making, the better advertising campaigns we can develop and target the right audience, with the goal of increasing the probability of successful sales of those products.
For this reason, neuromarketing has become an essential element for both large brands and companies that are just starting out, who want to develop their advertising and content from all areas, from the design of their products, prices, target, sales, etc.
In short, neuromarketing has become a discipline with great reach among companies that want to maximize the profitability and monetization of their ideas and carefully measure their ideas before launching them on the market.