These days, companies spend a lot on their advertising campaigns to connect with customers and increase their profit margins. Too often, these efforts fail because advertising experts neglect to consider how a person’s brain reflects on a product. This means that too many marketing choices are made based on claimed replies or rationalized behaviors. A better way to connect with customers is to use neuroscience research.
Understanding the Consumer Mind
Harvard University psychologists developed the concept of neuromarketing more than 30 years ago. It is an area of marketing exploration that looks into the cognitive, affective, and sensorimotor is of a consumer’s response to marketing material. This approach centers around understanding how people think. Research shows that 95% of a person’s thinking happens in the subconscious mind. It also confirms that people activate their conscious thought process to rationalize their behavior.
Advertisers are now diving into their customers’ subconscious minds to learn how effective their products, marketing materials, website content, and mobile applications are. To do this, they are using techniques like electroencephalography (EEG), eye tracking, facial coding, and galvanic skin response.
EEG measures a brain’s electrical activity to determine whether someone is experiencing increased or decreased excitement levels. Eye-tracking involves using small cameras to detect where a person is looking and how hard they are focusing on something. Facial coding measures the transformations in a person’s facial expressions that are mostly indiscernible to the naked eye. This allows researchers to detect an emotional reaction. Galvanic skin response assesses skin conductance, which is the amount of sweat a person is expelling, observing physiological stimulation to something happening externally.
Consumer Response to Marketing Messages
When neuroscience methods are used accurately, they should give a marketing team a way to develop advanced user interfaces and access real customer experiences. Companies can use EEG, facial coding, and eye-tracking to determine what their customers need to personalize their products and services.
How are companies using this technology? Frito-Lay completed a study to understand why people love Cheetos. The company used EEG in the research and found that people enjoyed how the orange dust coated their fingers and turned them the same shade. Frito-Lay used this information to point out how cheesy Cheetos are in their ads, resulting in higher sales.
eBay did a similar study to help with its marketing efforts. For the research, the company shared its e-commerce offering with participants and tested their brain wave activity. The study found that eBay customers consider speed to be the most critical part of its service. This allowed eBay to focus on how to increase payment speed for different e-commerce sites.
Companies are using functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning (fMRI) to measure and map brain activity. The technology uses a powerful magnetic field combined with radio waves to form customer journeys when viewing an advertisement or trying a product. Customer journey maps show you where and when the brain experienced something positive.
Consumers Don’t Understand Their Buying Tendencies
Barbara O’Connell from Milward Brown, a multinational market research firm, said, “Consumers aren’t very good at telling us why they buy what they buy.” For instance, some elements are essential to purchasing that consumers aren’t consciously aware of, including whether a product or service is modern, fun, convenient, and cool. However, people often report that affordability is the most crucial factor when asked about essential elements even though their buying behavior says otherwise.
Study the Brain to Improve Training
You can also improve customer service skills with brain study. Several neuroscience studies have assessed language to determine its importance in different forms like written, spoken, and video. This can help you review how useful your company’s training material is to lower new hire costs and save time.
This step will allow you to confirm whether you’re using the best material for the kind of training you have. You can also use brain studies to implement the best practices for your business. You might need a system, online or classroom training. Knowing more about neuroscience will allow you to deliver your company’s training material more effectively with better analogies, language, and storytelling.
Increase Profits and Customer Satisfaction With Tech Advancements
Understanding neuroscience for higher profits and better customer satisfaction has its challenges, but figuring out how people think to gain new insight is invaluable. At the Leonard Productivity Intelligence Institute, I work to help project managers operate as effectively as possible. Contact me today to learn how I can assist you.
