Author: Barbara Barilová
Date of Publication: 31/10/2022
The biggest challenge for marketers is to achieve the best possible results. This means increasing sales and awareness of a brand, product or service for the least amount of money. Therefore, it is important to understand what customers react to and what influences their purchasing behavior. Promotional activities can greatly influence customer behavior, desires and their willingness to pay for them.
Why should you use it?
Neuromarketing is a marketing discipline that analyzes brain processes. In fact, it relies on neuroscience to know people's motivations for making decisions. Thus, you can use this information to encourage the purchase of a particular product. In particular, neuromarketing looks at the emotions that are relevant to human decision making. In addition, it focuses on how the human brain responds to different sensory-marketing stimuli. Generally speaking, customer behavior is irrational and involves their emotions in their purchasing decisions. So, neuromarketing combines marketing, neurology, psychology and sociology as well to predict customer behavior. On the other hand, marketing is anything that helps to get a product or service into the minds of customers. This aims to make the product or service unforgettable and ultimately sold. It incorporates insights from human behavior research into this process. For example, it highlights products or services customers find more attractive than others and why.
Therefore, neuromarketing results in effective marketing communication according to actual brain reactions. This leads to the optimization of the product as a whole and it evokes emotions to us. Moreover, our purchasing behavior is influenced by the brand, the packaging, the material, its location or advertising.
How does Neuromarketing influence purchasing behavior of customers?
Neuromarketing uses both psychophysiological and neurophysiological methods to analyse the reactions of a potential target group to an advertising medium. This can be a product design, a service implementation or a shop layout. For example, different versions of an advertisement or website, an app interface or product packaging can stimulate customers to buy the product. E-commerce professionals rely on these methods to place and shape banner ads, order buttons, their visual elements and call-to-actions in the best possible way.
Important questions:
Where does the consumer's attention go?
How do they react?
Which areas of the brain are activated?
The aim is to understand the psychological processes triggered by the sight of an advertisement or a design using neurological methods. This involves techniques such as eye-tracking, which tracks eye movements and attention spans in response to a stimulus. Imaging methods such as fMRI allow us to observe the neuronal areas stimulated. Also, it is important to remember that the results of psychophysiological and neurophysiological studies come only from laboratory studies. In fact, they allow a better understanding of brain activity and the involvement of certain anatomical structures. However, in order to draw valid conclusions for economic applications, it is necessary to have solid expertise in both neuroscience and psychology. This can make it easier to establish links between the two fields.
Indeed, the human brain is divided into two parts:
one part that processes information consciously and rationally, and
another part processes the same information at an unconscious and irrational level.
Neuromarketing techniques based on objective data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography (EEG) can measure the reactions taking place in the unconscious part of our brain. They are measured when elements of our environment such as light, colors, or smells are changed and to discover how these changes affect decision making, which is supposed to be a conscious process. However, this additional information about unconscious reactions cannot be collected by traditional marketing means. So, neuromarketing is very useful to make better choices regarding our product strategy.
What are the benefits of using neuromarketing?
1. Increased conversion rates
Neuromarketing can optimize the exact elements that make people buy the products. For company, this is the good way of saving time and generate more money.
2. Adjust the value proposition
Your website only has a few seconds to make an impression on the customer about your value proposition. For example, who you are, what you do and why people should shop with you. Neuromarketing can help us optimize our website and boost conversion rates.
3. Optimize the shopping cart
Customers have a lot of anxiety when making a purchase and this anxiety isn’t always alleviated by money back guarantees or other guarantees. By getting to know the customer's unconscious doubts, we will be able to reduce abandonment and increase the conversion rate up to 30%.
4. Selecting the package that works best
Neuromarketing can very accurately measure the customer's response to design features such as color, images or fonts.
5. Tell interesting stories
One of the best ways to captivate someone is to tell a good story. This can also help customers gain a positive association with your brand.
Companies that are unable to personalize their customer relationships and base them on their needs and expectations will soon disappear. This type of personalization requires getting to know the customer at a much deeper level than web forms, focus groups or observations allow. It seems that the future of advertising lies in combining traditional marketing methods with neuromarketing to get a complete picture of the customer. Both techniques are insufficient separately. However, when combined, the increase in conversion rates is dramatic. So, we can suspect that it’ll be a hot topic for a long time.