When was the last time you made an impulse purchase? When was it that it walked into the store to purchase one item but left with a cart full of purchases?
Was it really your decision, or were you subtly influenced by carefully crafted marketing strategies? Every day, we're exposed to thousands of marketing messages that target not just our conscious minds, but our subconscious brain processes as well.
This fascinating intersection of neuroscience and marketing has given rise to a revolutionary field: neuromarketing.
It refers to the use of advanced technology to decode how different marketing efforts influence our buying decisions. By analyzing brain wave patterns, tracking eye movements, heart rate and measuring skin responses, companies can enhance their marketing strategies, improve design and merchandising, and refine other elements that capture consumer attention and boost engagement. Neuromarketing also employs techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess brain activity in response to various stimuli, providing deeper insights into consumer preferences and behaviors. This was practiced
How Marketers Tap into Our Senses
Our buying decisions are heavily influenced by sensory experiences. Here's how brands leverage each of our five senses:
- Sight: Through neuromarketing techniques, brands figure out the feelings behind every single thing. From fonts to logo to colors, brands use many visual elements to relate with the audience and stimulate neural activity in an area of the brain.
- For example: McDonald's prominently uses red and yellow in its branding. Red stimulates appetite and increases heart rate, while yellow evokes feelings of happiness and friendliness. This combination not only brings the feeling associated with craving but also creates a sense of urgency to eat quickly, aligning with the fast-food model.
- Smell: Dunkin' Donuts employs a unique marketing strategy by using a coffee-scented spray in their stores. This scent serves to attract customers to make purchases by invoking the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee, which can enhance mood and create a refreshing experience.
- Touch: The physical sensation of a product can become a decisive factor in consumer buying behavior. The softness of a Gucci scarf or the weight of a Rolex signals the brain to consider its exclusivity, quality and luxuriousness. Therefore, many brands focus on the tactile experience of their products.
- Taste: Grocery chains like Big Bazaar and Reliance Fresh often provide tasting stations for snacks, sweets, or ready-to-eat meals. This approach not only allows consumers to sample products before buying but also creates a positive sensory connection that can significantly influence purchasing decisions. The immediate feeling of tasting delicious food items often leads to increased sales as customers associate the positive experience with the brand.
- Hear: The sound of an ice cream truck is often accompanied by a distinctive jingle that evokes nostalgia and excitement, particularly among children. The jingle signals the arrival of a cheap treat, prompting spontaneous purchases.
Emotional Engagement in Marketing
You must have noticed how every other advertisement running today is playing around women empowerment, religion, family – concepts that resonate with the Indian market.
What do these adverts make you feel?
Today’s marketing encompasses the ability to leverage human emotions. By using insights provided by techniques like heart rate or skin responses, marketers create advertisements that invoke feelings of happiness, disappointment, pity, nostalgia or even fear- just like when Amazon reminds you that the item you added to your online shopping cart is going to be sold out soon. Makes you want to rush and buy it that instant, doesn’t it?
Well. Mission accomplished.
Concerns Surrounding Neuromarketing
While the concept of Neuromarketing has been around for more than two decades, companies are still skeptical using it because of a couple of reasons:
- Privacy: There have been concerns regarding Neuromarketing with many stating that it is a latent violation of privacy to ‘peep into’ people’s brains to find out what influences their consumer behavior. However, it is pertinent to note that just like focus groups or interviews, it is not practiced on everyone, but a carefully chosen group of members who wish to participate in the study and expressly grant their consent for the same.
- Costs: The technology and scientific equipment required to carry out this analysis is expensive, and companies of all sizes might not be able to afford it. This leaves the users limited to FMCG Giants like Kellogg's, who alter their food packaging based on insights from eye tracking heat maps.
- Sample size: Often, the sample size taken for Neuromarketing study is too small making critics question- ‘How reliable is this?’ because the chances of it being contaminated by bias is high.
Conclusion
While there lie several ethical concerns with this study and its tools, the benefits of this cannot be ignored. Hence, if used in a manner that it mitigates the ethical concerns to some extent, it can be a powerful tool to help marketers direct their marketing efforts in the right direction where it will yield the desirable results and hence acts as an important tool in revenue generation.