USING NEUROSCIENCE TO UNDERSTAND HOW CONSUMERS THINK?

Using Neuroscience to understand how consumers think?

After few years of costly research, a company launches a soft drink, only to see it ignored in the market.

Companies spend a lot of money in giving customers what they want and then watch the customers buy competing products instead.

The reason for nearly every one of these failures is a simple truth, too many marketers are not able to find how consumers mind interacts with a product, and a lot of marketing decisions are taken based on rationalized behavior or claimed responses.

Neuromarketing, a concept developed by psychologists at Harvard University 1990, is a field of marketing research that examines consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

This approach is based on understanding how consumers think, which shows that 95 percent of thinking takes place in our subconscious minds and that people use conscious thought as a way to rationalize behavior.

Few years back while testing a new advertisement, Cheetos used focus groups and Electroencephalography(EEG) to evaluate consumer response. In this ad, Cheetos featured a woman taking revenge on someone by putting the orange Cheetos in a dryer full of white clothes. Participants said they didn’t like the prank. However, EEG tests conducted on the same participants showed brain activity that suggested they actually loved the ad. Focus group participants didn’t admit it, probably because they didn’t want to look too mean-spirited to other group members.

Marketers have started looking to dive in the subconscious brain of a consumers to understand effectiveness of their products, advertisements, billboards, mobile applications, website content etc.

Few techniques used to measure this are:

measures electrical activity in the brain which is associated with increased or reduced focus/excitement.

EEG helps in measuring the emotional response of the brain while consumer looks at an advertisement, product, billboard, mobile applications. Via this technique, we can analyze the engagement of the customer without even asking him or her for the same. It would reveal when did the customer lost focus, got excited or felt connected.

Eye Tracking on Shelf

Eye tracking — small cameras can track eye movement and focus, it measures where the consumer is looking at, helping researchers understand which part of an advertisement or packing is most visually appealing to test subjects