Neuromarketing- as a competitive strategy
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Neuromarketing” is the new technique in business strategy but to be honest, companies have been using for decades without using the term. This definition of Neuromarketing is the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions. The reason why this is done is for the development of creatives in for cutting edge advertising, some use it in product development when developing a packaging and color of the product, it is also used to determine the price points and super marketing experts use this strategy to drive consumer behavior at the supermarket.
Why Neuromarketing
The goal of neuromarketing is to better understand consumer behavior by gaining insight into the reactions and decision-making happening at the unconscious level. Specially during the pandemic we have seen that people are going back to age old practices that our grand parents use to follow at home, some have gone to using traditional methods of beautifying one self, nourishing ones hair rtc. What neuromarketing will help you understand how to get your target customers to do what you want them to do after having understood their behavior. Let me share some key benefits of using Neuromarketing:
1) New view points
We in marketing are continuously trying to understand the impact our packaging, advertising creatives have on the sub conscious mind of a consumer. Neuromarketing provides these as it has a very different perspective from traditional research; it can measure the lower level effects of designs (such as print ads) and videos (such as TV and web ads) in terms of people’s attention, emotion and memory responses. This can in tern help in the management of a brand and attacking competitors. For instance latest reseach reveal that ‘ Khomba’ is a germ protector and many households in the North of Sri Lanka have a Khomba tree in their garden to cleanse the air. Even when a person gets Chicken Pox on the seventh day one uses Khomba leaves to kill the germs in a household. Based on this insight that Neuromarketing marketing specialists will use marketing techniques with subliminal adverting to bring this insight out and there by influence consumer behavior. Which is why this segment so exponential growth in the Sri Lankan market last year.
2) Uncover unconscious behavior
Even though we are all digital savvy, have you noticed that we yet want to take a look at the printed version of the newspaper so that we can make a judgement on the most important story if the day the day. Whether we like it or not we will see that this story will influence our behavior on that day. Neuromarketing is the discipline that will help us understand these behavior and how it can be used in marketing strategy. The best case in point is that in a control environment like a cinema hall or a super market environment if a stimuli either visually or in hearing if we broadcast, certain related brand sales will increase on that day. This is the sub conscious mind at play. Sharp marketers use such techniques.
Award winning coach and Neuromarketing advocate Dr Khyati Shetty
3) Quantify behavior
Neuromarketing will help marketers to describe or rate their emotional responses or how much attention they feel an ad evoked from them. For instance, the concept of ‘ habituation- which is due to constant exposure the in ability to stimulate a person.
Hence, if one gets exposed to a 30 second advertisement for long periods of time we will see that it will lose its impact of stimulating behavior. Hence, sharp marketers break this piece of stimuli to 5 second 20 sec pieces from the original creative and their by re stimulate the consumer with higher frequency with the same spend. This is one such example that one can quality the impact of Neuromarketing.
4) Get people connected emotionally
Have you ever wondered why you get hooked on to a supermarket outset near your house because the manager take time and asks you how you are and how the supermarket can increase their levels of serve. The logic goes back to power of Neuromarketing. A chemical reactions happen and change a cell only when a light is shone on it, shining our conscious awareness on a feeling can change the feeling. When you begin asking people to express how they feel about something they begin to examine, revise and rationalise their feelings and even when you were not happy with the store service level you begin get bonded with the brand unconsciously. This is the power of practicing Neuromarketing.
Ethical?
Whilst the practical implications of neuromarketing research is very strong there are questions asked on the ethicality of the science. My argument for this challenge is that if any form of science helps us to understand consumer behavior better and this in terms can be useful to be stringer on competitive advantage why not use it. However one must not intentionally promote anything that’s deceptive or illegal. This is where the distinction happens between good and bad.
Dr Athukorala is the Country Head for the Artificial Intelligence
company – Clootrack that operates out of Bangalore and he head the Sri Lanka, Maldives and Pakistan businesses.