To increase their number of sales, companies have had to build techniques and devise strategies that allow them to connect both rationally and emotionally with their potential buyers. The great achievement that marketing achieved had to do with first understanding how the buyers’ brain works in each of the stages of the buyer journey to analyze their psyche in greater detail, the founding 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. Given the social theories about how consumer societies behave, neuromarketing is nothing more than a much more specialized technique for understanding how these purchasing needs occur and what the 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 prominence as a science that investigates and studies How the brain behaves when faced with a desire to consume.
What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is a word composed of two terms:
Neuro: which refers to neuroscience and the study of the brain) and
Marketing: (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 has as a base. studies related to brain processes and how they are triggered by certain consumption stimuli.
Neuromarketing seeks to measure neural 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 devices. not for medical purposes, but for marketing purposes.
Later, companies such as Coca-Cola and Ford began to hire research centers to carry out market studies using biometrics. Biometrics consists of applying statistical methods and calculations in the study of biological phenomena. However, it was not until 2002 that the expression “neuromarketing” was coined for the first time by marketing professor Ale Smidts, from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. 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 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 are activated, depending on whether the subject knew or did not know what brand they were drinking. By 2012, the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association (NMSBA) was founded, which is an organization that is responsible for carrying out research related to neuromarketing and its relevance today.
Why study the brain?
Although among the qualitative techniques that stand out the most for carrying out market research have been surveys and focus groups, both methods are not always reliable since the people who are interviewed can alter their answers. That is, there are factors that can influence what they answer, 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 claim to like a product but in his mind, he may be thinking just the opposite. So this technique is ideal for obtaining real data about what a person truly thinks and feels. Studying how the brain behaves in this decision-making is essential to analyze what is the best time 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.
- Devise appropriate content for each stage of the purchasing process.
- Evaluate the reaction of an audience to certain visual stimuli (colors, images, texts).
- Identify which areas of the brain are activated in the purchasing processes.
- Optimize the customer experience.
- Act on people’s emotional experience and memory.
What is the importance of neuromarketing?
The more we can understand the factors that influence consumer decision-making, the better advertising campaigns can be developed and directed to the correct audience, with the aim of increasing the probability of success in selling these products.
For this reason, neuromarketing has become an essential element, both for big brands and for companies that are just starting out, that 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 scope among companies that want to make the most of their ideas and thoroughly measure their ideas before launching them on the market.
