02/11/2022
What actually is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is about looking into the customer's brain, about understanding how purchasing decisions are made.
The goal: the creation of the most efficient advertising measures possible.
Of all things, the eternal battle between two soda manufacturers for the favor of customers is the birth of neuromarketing. In 2002, two brain researchers discovered that Coca-Cola and Pepsi each activate two different areas of the consumer's brain. An article about this in the popular press quickly made waves.
It was found that the Coca-Cola brand, unlike Pepsi, manages to activate both the hippocampus (responsible for memories) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (responsible for emotions). While consumer advocates were horrified and saw consumers exposed to unscrupulous scientists who could manipulate consumers from now on, the marketing industry reacted with enthusiasm.
Innovative marketing and market research specialists became interested in brain research. And because the new was not to remain without a name for long, this discipline was called neuromarketing.
Neuromarketing is no longer completely new, but many people - even marketers - have little idea of what it is. So what is behind it?
To put it pragmatically, neuromarketing is concerned with how choices and buying decisions are made in the human brain, and very important for advertising: how they can be influenced. The search is on for the magic "buy button".
As is so often the case in science, there is a narrower as well as a broader definition in neuromarketing. The former equates the discipline with the use of apparative procedures - for example, the brain scanner. The broader definition basically includes all findings and methods of brain research.
Interesting here is virtually everything that happens in our upper minds:
Consciousness as the supremacy of unconscious decision-making processes. Multisensory processing: How are smells, sounds, etc. processed in the brain? Findings from this flow into product and packaging design, for example.
Emotional-cognitive processing: How are ads and TV commercials received and processed in the brain?
Neurolinguistics: How is language processed?
Neuroscientific personality research: How do people differ in their product and brand preferences? Target group strategies can be derived from the classification of customers into different personality types.
Brain research shows us that the conscious and rational customer is an illusion. Purchase decisions are firstly made largely unconsciously and secondly are always emotional. In the course of neuromarketing research, the term "emotional boosting" was thus coined: Marketing from the brain's point of view.
Selling to Adam or Eve?
Finally, two other aspects increasingly interest marketing: the age and gender of (potential) customers.
Although critics sometimes criticized as less than politically correct, both aspects play an important role in advertising today.
Cognitive systems also differ according to gender and age
For example, more than 200 differences in brain and neurochemistry have been identified between men and women - differences with significant impact on thinking, emotion, behavior, and ultimately buying. Moreover, the aging consumer is a challenge in early 21st-century Europe. Neuroscientists have discovered that emotional and cognitive systems change, in some cases significantly, throughout a lifetime. This means that target groups differ not only according to their tastes and preferences, but also according to gender and age.
We also distinguish between the terms neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience. While the former is more application and practice-oriented, the latter is about basic neuroscientific research on buying behavior.
