New understanding of Customer’s emotions
For decades, companies have invested a huge proportion of their time and money to the 4P’s of marketing and no doubt the results have been amazingly fruitful. But is the traditional marketing enough to understand the complex human emotions that drive 95% of the customer’s decision-making journey? How are we supposed to know what factors led the customer to select a particular brand or a product while he seemed to be interested in the other? Clearly, 4P’s still remain the important parameters in one’s marketing decision making but relying solely on the 4P’s can kick marketers right on their face. Today’s marketing decisions should not be about hitting in the dark but should be to reach out to customer’s inner emotions strategically. And so here comes the role of neuromarketing.
Neuroscience marketing has been around for a few years and regardless of whether you are familiar with that term or not, you probably would have heard of some of the insights that the marketers have learned from it. While the traditional marketing focuses on understanding customer behavior based on the past data or through conducting market research. Neuroscience marketing takes a dig into it by studying subject’s brain response to specific product packaging, colors used in packaging, sound that the box creates when shaken or specific neural activity in the brain when we see an emotional ad. Sometimes referred to as consumer neuroscience-it studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Until recently considered as an extravagant “frontier science,” neuromarketing has been bolstered over the past five years by several groundbreaking studies that demonstrate its potential to create value for marketers.
In a study conducted by some of the researchers at Emory University, subjects were served with the samples of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in an FMRI machine. When the subjects were unaware of the brand’s name, their brain showed consistent neural response but when they could see the brand label, their limbic structures( brain areas associated with emotions, unconscious processing and memories) showed increased neural activity, highlighting the fact that knowing the brand’s name altered the way, their brain perceived the message.
In a similar study at INSEAD, researchers tested the brain response of three of their subjects while giving them 3 different types of wines to taste. They later demonstrated that the most expensive wine was perceived as the best one to taste.
Despite its promising academic findings, pessimism persists and there is still a lot of grey area to be explored. However, several tech-giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google have already started incorporating expensive neuromarketing tools like EEG and FMRI into their market study and are generating reliable answers from their findings. We still don’t know how much promising neuromarketing proves to be in the future or how long will it take for marketers to get their hands on it but companies surely cannot miss such a golden opportunity to understand their customer’s mind better.
Did you find this article insightful? Kindly comment your opinion/thoughts in the comment section below. :)
Published By~ Vanshika Shukla
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.