Neuromarketing Techniques Every Marketeer Should Know About

With neuromarketing gaining increased popularity over the last couple of years we’ve taken a look at five regularly used neuromarketing techniques to see how they work and where they are most suited.

Eye Tracking:

Eye tracking consists of measuring the eye movement patterns of your research participants and as a tool it lets you see your brand, store or commercial through the eyes of your customers.

For example if you let your consumers walk through your store, gallery, exhibition equipped with eye tracking gear to analyse how they view the area, you can monitor if promotions, signs and particular elements are being read.

This is useful to establish consumer viewing patterns and is a far superior way of obtaining instant feedback than traditional marketing research.    

In addition eye tracking can also be utilised to measure the eye-gaze of consumers online as well. This could be to measure if product placement during TV programmes actually engage people to look more at a product.

The Consumer Brain:

In addition to knowing what people see it’s even more important to know what they are thinking! There are several devices such as fMRI’s and EEG equipment that can read brain activity and these are being used by neuromarketers to look at people’s brains in order to create alluring adverts, websites and packaging that press the consumers buy buttons.    

This means that scientists can read if consumers like or dislike a product, if they feel more like approaching or avoiding an exhibition item, or if they get excited or bored by a certain advertisement.  The benefits of this is that it can help marketers to create products that really speak to the consumer, and it can help consumers get products that make them happy.

Measuring these variables with EEG scans to analyse brainwaves provides great temporal resolution, meaning that the effects of a certain stimulus on brain activity can be read at incredible speed. For example, this is very useful to analyse which exact sequences in a commercial are viewed as positive and which ones are not.

Facial Coding:

It’s not just the eye and brain measurement we can track but we can also learn a lot from the face.  In the same line as equipment to measure the brain and our eye gaze, there are also sensors that can be attached to the face and measure tiny movements of muscles. When we display certain emotions, like smiling, we use specific muscles to achieve this. The same principle applies to other emotions such as anger or surprise.

Of course, a slight expression of a faint smile does not always mean that someone is happy. But the point is, facial coding equipment can measure subtle, oftentimes subconscious, reactions to stimuli that hold information about how we feel about something. Even better, it can predict what behaviour will follow said expressions.

Sensory Marketing:

There are several forms of sensory marketing, such as touch, sound or smell and they aim to influence a brand audience by sensory stimulation.
With emotional products like the purchases in a fashion store, pleasant smells will give customers a whole new experience and will make products seem more exclusive and high end. In addition with sound it’s been identified that consumers will pay more attention to light objects when they hear more high pitched sounds, and more to dark objects when hearing low pitched sounds. Studies have discovered that these subtle changes in the in-store environment can have quite dramatic impacts on sales.

Psychological Methods

Psychological techniques can be quite subtle. A speaking example, though perhaps more commonly known these days, is that merely removing the pound  sign listed for your products can increase your sales. Seeing a pound sign subconsciously shifts people’s attention to loss and not gain. In fact studies have found that people spend significantly more cash on products and food when a money sign is absent.

Furthermore, studies have proven that people are more likely to choose healthy menu options when displayed on the left side of the menu and unhealthy items on the right? Or that large, open spaces in luxury stores are associated with high social status?

To sum up all of these methods are effective in different contexts but the key is really knowing when to use these techniques to achieve maximum impact.