Supercharged marketing? Neuromarketing is the answer!
Everyone knows that good marketing is key to business success, but what exactly is good marketing? Creating endless copy, SEO optimisations, newsletters, multichannel targeting, funnels, promotions… it becomes spam. People tune out and you lose your audience. Your return on investment is in the negative and so is your motivation.
Neuromarketing provides the supercharged marketing and consumer behaviour solution you’ve been looking for. Applying neuroscience and consumer psychology to traditional marketing lets you target the exact consumer psychographics for your product or service. :
What is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is a discipline that provides the ideal intersection between three closely related, and well-established areas. Made popular by the greats such as David Ogilvy, traditional marketing has been responsible for fueling the rise of capitalism in its current form. However, traditional marketing tactics are wearing thin, and the overt approach has helped to create the marketing counterculture. This is easy to see among Gen-Z consumers, who are much savvier in spotting marketing ploys. It’s clear that traditional marketing, while still effective, is not enough anymore.
Behavioural research like consumer economics, social psychology and applied neuroscience has a wealth of data that can be mined for insight by traditional marketing teams but is not practically applicable in its raw, or academic form. The solution is to combine traditional marketing techniques and focus groups with medical imaging and diagnostics tools in order to generate data and results that provide, applicable concrete outcomes in corporate marketing.
95% of decisions are made unconsciously because conscious iterative thought requires a lot of energy. Our brains are fundamentally lazy and love finding shortcuts to what it perceives as the best outcome. Neuroscience has long been the gold standard for understanding behaviour.
However, it’s only recently made an appearance in applied neuromarketing and market research. At NBS you can study cutting edge neuroscience programs , learning from experts in consumer behaviour, neuroscience and business.
Applying neuroscience to marketing opens a whole new universe to explore. Endless possibilities help you keep your marketing fresh, creative, and most importantly, effective. It helps take the guesswork out of setting up consumer profiles and cuts down on A/B testing saving you a lot of time and money. By using data from neuroscience and neuromarketing studies, the ideal consumer profile can be constructed in incredible detail, while creating hyper-targeted marketing strategies.
Understanding the subconscious cognitive processes behind decision-making is fundamental when creating your marketing or product strategy.
Simply put: If you don’t activate the correct subconscious processes, your audience will be essentially blind and deaf to your offer. Many neuromarketing authors have studied these types of phenomena, often called the “corner of death” in visual advertising. Place any important information in the bottom right corner of an advertisement and your audience will hit a mental blind spot.
Using the most effective cues on your target demographic allows you subconsciously shape and inform their decision-making, without being overt, irritating and spammy. Presenting something as the most obvious option or logical conclusion, allows your consumer’s brain to agree, instead of engaging in an active decision-making process, which makes them 80% more likely to spend money.
There are many neuromarketing strategies that can be used according to your budget, needs and business areas. Contrary to traditional marketing approaches that flood clients with information and rely on high visibility, in the hope they will eventually buy a product. Instead, neuromarketing taps into how cognitive and sensorial processes allow us to perceive the world. The main focus is on creating a holistic strategy that targets many different layers of an individual’s perception. Let’s look at how companies can incorporate these neuromarketing tactics to get the best bang for their buck when it comes to marketing budgets and strategies.
Experiential marketing
This modality focuses on creating an integrated experience around the product or service that is being offered to the target market. Research shows that people are most likely to make a decision based on experience, instead of making a decision based on data. Emotions play a particular role in this -strong emotions, whether positive or negative, often spark an action. Experiential marketing allows marketers to provoke emotions and thoughts around their product, creating strong associations between experiences offered to the target audience and the offer. Memory formation is primarily based on experiences and the emotions they cause. Using experiential marketing and neuroscience data to create the ideal customer experience creates a high degree of relevance and salience, that people remember long after the event.
Designing and curating a specific experience around your product will leave people with a lasting impression, promoting word-of-mouth and evangelism, both of which increase your social proof.
Sensory marketing
Audio and visual material is dominant in modern media, causing a lot of “noise” when it comes to publicity and marketing. The best sensory marketing strategies focus on all five senses, as well as targeting our most primal sense: smell. According to research, people never forget a smell and the things they associate with it. Using smell, or things that evoke a specific smell (like warm bread, chocolate chip cookies or flowers), lets you cut through the sensory noise, and reach your audience on a different level.
Touch is another, often overlooked, a sense that is extremely important to how we perceive the world, consciously and unconsciously. Tactile information tells our subconscious a lot about the importance of a product. Integrating smell and touch with audiovisual marketing gives you a sensory edge in the subconscious, reinforcing your call to action and product relevance.
Neuropricing and Neurosales
Neuroscience can be directly applied to decision-making pathways and behavioural economics. When determining the price of a product or service, you can use neuroscientific data on decision-making in combination with user testing, to determine which pricing strategy would provide the best return on investment and sales turnover for your product.
Neurosales uses neuroscientifically based negotiating principles to help you close deals effectively. It adds a whole new dimension to business development, creating or improving marketing strategies and communicating effectively and persuasively with your business network.
Neuroscience Business School is one of the few higher education institutions to offer a fully accredited Masters in Neurosales, focusing on teaching you the underlying science behind successful negotiation, mindfulness in business, marketing keys and consumer behaviour. Contact us to find out more, and take your business career to the next level
Neuromarketing Careers
In any business that deals with people, we are required to deal with the thing that makes people unique: the brain. We could argue, that understanding the cognitive and neurobiological processes of the brain, is fundamental to understanding any human interaction.
This becomes even more apparent when we consider how we present our product or business to potential customers or clients. In the field of marketing, there are many specialised streams, such as growth hacking and digital product marketing etc. When you study the neurocognitive basis of how people consume, perceive and interpret marketing material allows you to refine your strategy and designs so you don’t waste energy and resources targeting people outside of your ideal consumer profile. Doing a Masters in Neuromarketing provides you with the ideal and innovative launchpad for any kind of marketing career you want to specialise in. It’s especially beneficial for entrepreneurs and startups. A more cost-effective, impact-producing marketing strategy decreases the turnaround-to-profitability timeline most start-ups face. It also allows you to create a scaleable marketing strategy, making it easier to grow your business.
More technical and research-oriented careers include user testing, A/B testing, doing market research or neuromarketing research studies.
Many companies have started to specialise in offering neuromarketing services, such as data collection and user testing. Neurons Inc, Neurensics and the Institute of Sensory Analysis.
With so many exciting options to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. The first choice on your Neuromarketing journey? Join the NBS program, and take an in-depth dive into the magical connections between the brain and successful, impact-driven marketing that will skyrocket your business marketing strategies
