Neuromarketing – The Brain at the Point of Sale

(Picture: © Markus Bormann - Fotolia.com)

For many products – and their providers – the decision whether they are successful or not is only made at the Point of Sale, i.e. in the store, catalogue or web shop. But at that time, a huge amount of the goods has already been produced, and with it have come all the investments into design, production and marketing. Reliable future trends forecasts are therefore a main factor for economic efficiency. As often a lot of time passes between the planning of a product and its presentation in the sales room, for providers the question about high market potential topics and branding for upcoming seasons arises at an early stage.

Besides an intensive research of trends and multilateral product planning, there is one term finding its way into concepts and meetings of marketing planners more and more frequently: neuromarketing. But what exactly is neuromarketing? And what does it really have to offer?

What is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is an interdisciplinary field of research. It is based on neuroeconomics, which is a combination of neurosciences and economics, and deals with the research of people’s behavior, or that of consumers respectively, in specific economic situations (purchase stimulus, product decisions, etc.). The scientists on the one hand try to work out neuronal structures regarding general economic processes. On the other hand, measuring a concrete physiological effect of brands and advertising on the brain is a further field of interest. Thus, approaches and findings from market research, brain research and neurosciences come together.

Market research supports the marketing in its process steps of planning, implementation and control. It tries to analyze complex situations and to define them as precisely as possible in terms of content, amplitude and time reference. Therefore it has been using statistical-representative (quantitative) and subject-oriented (qualitative) methods already since the 1950s and 60s. Amongst other things, researchers tried to determine the customers’ actual behavior systematically, using computer-aided research methods such as measurement of eye movements for instance. The growing interest in the customers’ motives and needs, reinforced by the transformation from a shortage to an affluent society, has led to a special focus on psychological market research.

Methods and Techniques

With the help of neuromarketing, one now intends to find out whether and what unconscious or not directly comprehensible reasons lead to the consumers’ (purchase) decisions. Since the start of the millennium, amongst others a special technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used, which is able to measure and display the reaction of single areas of the brain to different stimuli. The visual presentation of products a consumer strongly identifies with, for example, creates a higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

By creating spectacular pictures, these methods –interestingly and ironically – seemed to push the “magic button”, which marketing specialists tried to find in the consumers, inside the specialists themselves, especially in the beginning. They became really euphoric about the idea of finally being able to watch the buyers making their purchase decision with the help of this technology. The industry, too, hoped for scalable results concerning the consumer’s unconscious thoughts and desires, to which they would be able to respond profitably with a range of suitable products and product designs.

Probably the most known study about this topic was published in 2004 by McClure and others in an issue of the magazine Neuron. The aim of the study was to find out the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi from a neuroscientific perspective: although these two drinks are chemically nearly identical, consumers slightly prefer Coca Cola. In order to find out more about the reasons, 60 people were placed in an MR scanner where they drank both lemonades through a long flexible tube. When the subjects did not know which beverage they were drinking, one half of them preferred Pepsi, the other one Coca Cola, showing a higher activity in the reward areas of the brain (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) while drinking their preferred lemonade.

But in those cases in which the person had been told in advance which drink was in the tube, the nerves in the memory regions of the brain (amongst others both parts of the hippocampus and close-by regions) showed a strong activity when drinking Coca Cola. With Pepsi, on the other hand, these regions showed nearly no reaction. Thus, researchers came to the conclusion that Coca Cola is able to create much stronger associations than Pepsi and activate people’s memory in a way Pepsi does not.

Neuromarketing Today

A more recent action taken by the print magazine New Scientist in 2010 aimed at determining the strongest of three cover pictures for its August edition. The publishers of the magazine assigned that task to the international agency NeuroFocus.

Three parameters were chosen as “primary neuro metrics”: emotional engagement, attention and retentiveness. According to the researchers, measurements of purchase intention, innovation and consciousness can be derived from these parameters.

In the case of the above-mentioned issue of the New Scientist one of the cover pictures was clearly identified as the one with the highest neurological effectiveness. According to the Features Editor the corresponding issue was not only surprisingly successful, with 12 % more copies sold than of the equivalent issue in the year before, but it was also the second-best of the whole year – despite the fact that the month of August is seen as a rather “difficult” month in the publishing industry.

Although the New Scientist gathers numerous readers in the English-speaking countries, it may be doubted whether these results can be transferred onto other consumer goods. New Scientist author and journalist Graham Lawton concludes: “Obviously this is not a scientific experiment. We have not proved that neuromarketing works – to even attempt that would require a lot more time and resources than we had at our disposal.”

And this way, the initial euphoria is marking time, not only due to the high costs that this method entails compared to traditional consumer research. But what might be certain by now is that something like a “magic button” in our brains does not exist.

Find more information here: - www.newscientist.com
- Think Neuro! Das Neuromarketing-Blog
- Marktforschung mit Neuromarketing
- Neuronen würden Whiskas kaufen (SZ 13.7.2005)
- Neurofocus Inc. im Presseportal
- neurofocus.com