Marketing is integral part of business. Not only in business marketing techniques are important to connect people in right way whether for your product, service or idea. There is one famous phrase “Success Is Determined By Your Ability To Sell Yourself”. Selling yourself is all about marketing.
There are three actors in marketing world:
- The one who wants to sell: It can be product seller , service provider or some brand advertiser.
- The idea/product/service
- The target audience can be single person or groups of people. There are various ways to define audience in marketing strategy. Some aspects like buyer persona can help in that.
Let’s proceed with target audience from here as we have to get into our core subject. Target audience will be human beings and to make our marketing strategy successful we have to win the audience, in short we have to win human beings. This is where traditional marketing approach limits itself. It ends with the human being we (marketer) want to convince.
But what happens if we go into deeper details of this hierarchy? Let’s get into it.
Human body consists of various organs and one of them is brain. Brain is where all action happens. Brain has unique decision making process. It responds to external factors in unpredictable way. And these responses initiate human being to take actions. All those our target audience are going to use their brains to take decisions. In short to make marketing successful we have to win those brains by making sure they decides things in our favor. This is the approach which Modern marketing follows.
What is Neuromarketing?
Latest research in neuroscience field discovered details about internal functioning of brain. The two primary tools for scanning the brain are fMRI and EEG. The human brain has conscious and subconscious to take decisions. The latest research revealed that decisions are more influenced by subconscious mind. The person don’t have any control on subconscious mind .With this knowledge a new way of modern marketing technique is evolving and that is called neuromarketing. In recent research scientists are able to find out insides about decision making process of human brain, how it works at subconscious level and responds to certain inputs.
Neuromarketing is branch of marketing which uses conclusions drawn by researches in neuroscience. It puts impact at subconscious level of target audience which influence their decisions.
Is it something completely new?
Neuromarketing is not something completely new. In traditional marketing we use psychological factors and behavioral traits. Just like we already know green color is pleasant to eyes and it is sign of cleanliness. Smiling face has ability to change our mood and bring positivity. Images are easy to remember than words. Brain always remembers different and add things. These are some conclusions from old psychology books. However earlier we had drawn these conclusions by observing human beings using different ways like product surveys, in person discussions, tracking user behavior or historical data. Also these ways of determining deals externally and there was no way to detect if someone pretend instead of showing real behavior. E.g. Customer lied in survey. And hence the perfection of these conclusions is not assured. However neuromarketing is based on internal research of brain system which that person can’t control and hence derived conclusions are close to perfection. It checks brain responses and derive conclusions with accuracy.
What are those techniques?
Most of the techniques has lot of dedicated articles on internet as well as case studies. Some of the those are Loss Aversion ,Color psychology, relativity concept, Decision Paralysis, Influence of Trust Factor, Reciprocity Method, Evaluating Satisfaction, Anchoring, Social and market norms, zero cost effect, etc. Each technique has case studies and can be checked out on internet. However to know how each of these works you have to deep dive into that. Every principle has different aspects and behaviors. After understanding technique it can be used in marketing strategy. Companies like PepsiCo, Daimler, the Weather Channel, and EBay used neuromarketing actively not only in marketing but also in business strategy planning. However never expect that they will reveal the strategies and you follow them to grow your business. In marketing world working strategies has always kept as a secret by companies. Only way to bring neuromarketing in action is to study yourself and setup your strategy on top of it. Some old school business books will help well in that. Some of those are predictability irrational and braininfluence. There are neuromarketing journals with research papers to study. Some of those are Frontiers in Neuroscience, PLOS ONE, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Advertising Research
How and where to use?
Neuromarketing you can apply in so many different ways in different environments to achieve different goals. You can apply right from selecting location for your business office, retail outlet, domain for your website, your business strategy, cost and launch dates of your products to marketing ideas for products. Most of the times you can see neuromarketing in action in social media. In digital marketing from design of graphics to content of posts neuromarketing can be applied everywhere. All depends on how you understand and apply those principles. In digital world it is evolved a lot and use of neuroscience and technology is next big thing in marketing world.
Apart from digital marketing it can be applied for offline marketing to win target audience and build connections.
Is it ethical?
Now most important question about neuromarketing is about its harmfulness. The potential concern is neuromarketing can take control of brain, Influence decisions completely and trigger buy button in customer’s brain. All these ethics sounds scary but there is another way to look at it. Before considering neuromarketing as master manipulator we have to check definition of marketing. Marketing is itself about convincing the customer. Influence is always there and we can’t deny that. Otherwise there is no need of costly online campaign and hiring highly skilled marketing managers. However the way neuromarketing brings perfection in convincing the customer maybe reason of concern. However new evolutions in technology always come with its downside. It’s totally up to human beings that how we are going to use it. Same technology can be used to provide better customer experience and to build better products.
Author: Ramakant samant
Ramakant Samant is Digital Marketing strategist at Spark+ technologies. Spark+ has specialization in Blockchain development, Product development, Digital marketing and web /mobile app development services. The company also provides Blockchain, Digital Marketing and Neuromarketing training. Website: www.sparkplustech.com
