Neuroscience is being applied to many areas of business; one such area is marketing, where the field of “neuromarketing” is becoming more prominent as large advertising and marketing firms around the world use the latest techniques for understanding buyer behaviour.
When you think about it, it was inevitable that marketers welcomed neuroscience into their discipline, because it helps to make sense of, and find reasons for, why humans act the way they do – a subject that is key to marketing is built.
First Things First – What is Marketing?
Marketing is loosely defined as promoting the value of a product or service to customers. Part of the marketing strategy for business from the year dot has been creating the desired responses (buying impulses) by shaping a message in a particular way.
It was, to an extent, the same in a Roman forum, Greek agora, a Shakespearean market or in a shopping mall or on TV or the Internet today. There was a certain amount of “behavioural science” going on then as a marketer tried to demonstrate the value of his product – whatever it was – to the market. He or she would try to press the right behavioural “buttons.”
Nowadays you may have noticed how ads on the TV rarely just talk about features and benefits of a product; they talk about how it makes people feel – the lifestyle, the dreams it opens up. That’s why ads for sanitary towels feature butterflies and green fields and smiling women!
Predicting what people want and how they will react to certain stimuli is all part of framing a marketing message that is persuasive – and that’s where neuroscience comes in.
“Neuromarketing”
Nothing is quite as sweet to marketers as the belief that they can read their customers’ minds!
Neuroscience, in a very crude sense, can be considered as reading people’s brain functions to determine how and why they act the way they do. Patterns of behaviour are interpreted from fMRI scans of the brain which show the areas of the brain that are activated most under particular stimuli.
What goes through viewers’ minds when they view a TV ad or a digital campaign? That’s the question that every TV ad campaigner wants to know the answer to. Well, advertising and market research agencies, which help create the campaigns, now have the tools of neuroscience at their disposal to find out.
Agencies are investigating areas such as the effect different screens have on audience engagement to advertising and how sales can be influenced through a lifetime of brand exposure.
Drawing the Line
Where do you draw the line, in terms of business ethics?
Is it OK to wire up a research group to measure electrical signals at the scalp in order to determine when people have memorised an image or message? Big UK companies like John Lewis and Aviva seem to think so, and have already started to apply the findings to their marketing campaigns.
Neuromarketing companies sometime just confirm things that were already widely suspected; but at other times the neuroscience uncovers audience reactions that make fine tuning of a particular campaign necessary. For instance, if the audience has been shown to “tune out” at certain parts of an ad, that part can be made shorter.
It could be argued that, when it comes to marketing nowadays, anything goes. The expense of neuromarketing will make it prohibitive to many businesses, but it has already been utilised by big companies as you have seen – so it may be naive to think it will not be utilised more in the future. It may even become the focal point of marketing.
The question of where to draw the line remains valid, though.
