NEUROMARKETING??? It was three years ago since I heard this word for the very first time while I was in Marketing Research class doing my postgrade studies at Fundesem Business School, and itreally grabbed my attention. By then, lots of questions arose inside me…What it is Neuromarketing? a new kind of marketing discipline? a new tool for measure any sort of behaviour? Is this the step leadingo to manipulate customer’s likes? As any marketing terminology, I was very excited and eager to know more about it. Definitely, it was a unknown concept ready to explore.
It has been taken more time that I thought before I would be able to explain it from my own approach. I understand Neuromarketing as new research system As anecdotal origin and to understand better the scope of this methodology, we recall the famous “Pepsi Challenge” campaign in which participants were asked testing two sodas, for after say (without knowing what brand of coke they were testing), which preferred. Slightly more than half of the participants chose Pepsi. But Pepsi was not the market leader. What’s was wrong? This attracted the attention of Read Montague, a specialist in neuroscience, who again repeated the experience in 2003 with 67 people, using tomographs and MRI scanners, he found that both colas “activate” the brain’s reward system. The most remarkable about this was that, when they said to the participants what was the soda they were drinking, a different activity was detected in other brain areas. In this instance the 75% of participants said they preferred Coke. Weird? no, I wolud say rational. The brain area as “activation” was shown by MRI was the medium prefrontal cortex, responsible for the control of the higher thought.
Montague concluded that the brain reproduced images, and ideas generated by the brand, also that it exceeded the quality or taste of this product. Therefore, it is a further evidence of the enormous power of the brand.
It’s known that marketers can measure the results of taken actions, in terms of sales,brand awareness, likes,preferences, etc.. This is why we understand better the beginning and the end of the consumption process, but not the fundamental part in between. That is to say, what happens in the consumer’s mind, and this is what Neuromarketing is changing.
The Neurosciences detected the consumer’s difficulty or inability to express the emotional reasons that their consumption habits generated, and their reactions to different marketing stimuli. Also, we should remember and never forget that consumer decisions are based on subjective feelings, and these feelings are linked to sensory stimuli that are activated when consumption.
I admit that it has taken some time to me identifying this process, I’ve even learned a lot of technical words related to the topic, which is at the least rewarding, but let’s put it in simple words, Neuromarketing is the application of the neuroscience techniques to marketing stimuli, in order to understand how the brain “activates” to the marketing actions.
The techniques used by neuroscience are mainly psychophysics – just list them- reaction times / detection levels, images of MRI scanners, and magneto-encephalographic electroencephalographs-Honestly, I’ve a little idea about this…- All this goes hand in hand with the progress made in the recent years on understanding the brain function and evolution that allows the application of this progress is significant, considering that for a long time marketers have been using behavioral studies and psychology of the 70’s as a guide in our research.
Some companies have gone more deep into this. Daimler-Chrysler has found that most sporting models activate the reward center in the brain and the face recognition area, which would explain the people’s tendency to anthropomorphize their cars.
Another interesting result was obtained by asking a group of people, they should watch pictures of different brands and products, and make a ranking according to their preferences for each. Then, they repeated the test using a magnetic resonator. Finally, Montague found that there was a significant activity in the half of the prefrontal cortex. It’s the area linked to the sense of self. This serves to assess if there are the correlation between our brand and the person in question.
Conclusion Perhaps I may be wrong, but according to information I have gathered on the subject combined with my knowledge, I strongly believe that the best application of Neuromarketing is the prediction of consumer behavior, which is the biggest challenge facing marketing, the gap between the mind and behavior, which will allow to choose the most appropiate media format, the development of notices/impulses that people remember more clearly, and basically how consumer behavior differs fromthe one in which the methods used today tell us.