Neuromarketing has a great future

How do they play with our emotions to get us to buy more?

Humans are not thinking machines that feel; we are sentimental machines that think.. This statement by Portuguese neurologist António Damásio illustrates very well our way of deciding when it comes to choosing any option.

And the fact is that our choices are not entirely rational, since they are mostly made by the oldest part of our brain, the so-called reptilian brain. This is in charge of primary vital functions and survival instincts, and was developed by our ancestors millions of years ago, so it is preverbal. That is, it does not understand complex messages, so it prefers images to words.

We think that we are rational beings, that we make the best decisions economically speaking. Nothing could be further from the truth, due to the emotional bias to which our decisions are subject and which also extends to the field of purchases. Therefore, any slight difference in a product or service (and in the way it is sold) will cause our reptilian brain, and therefore us, to lean towards a particular option.

With such a saturated market of products and services, it is estimated that 80% of new products fail in their first three years of life. Having a perfect marketing mix is key to success. But this does not guarantee 100% success, which is an issue that drives marketing experts upside down as they fail to understand the real reasons for the fiasco.

To try to understand consumer decision-making, researchers have been using various market research techniques such as group dynamics, surveys and interviews for decades. However, these methods have proven to be quite limited when it comes to predicting the success of any campaign, mainly because we now know that decisions have subconscious processes that cannot be detected in this type of study. Because in order to know what consumers want, it is not necessary to know what they say, but what they feel, and in this task, neuromarketing can help us to understand what they want. neuromarketing has begun to play a fundamental role in this task..

The role of neuromarketing in consumer behavior

One proof that we are not rational beings is the neuromarketing experiment conducted by the California Tech Institute. In it, different people were given wine from 5 different bottles, but there were two pairs of bottles with the same wine, i.e. three different types of wine. However, the bottles with the same wine were labeled one with a lower price and one with a much higher price. The individuals had to rate the quality and in turn were connected to a brain scanner. The conclusion of the study was that the price of wine activated more the part of the brain related to the sensation of pleasure..

This study, and others that we showed you in a previous post, show the importance of knowing the brain's reaction to the stimuli we receive to determine if they are really going to appeal to the emotions of the potential consumer. To this end, neuromarketing, which has been defined by Lee et. al (2007) as the application of neuroscience methods to analyze and understand human behavior in relation to markets and exchanges, has several tools.

Among the most widely used are electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It should be noted that fMRI is the tool that best maps the brain structures involved in emotional reactions. What this tool achieves is to detect the change of Blood flow in the different areas of the brain. This is interesting because the more blood flow, the more activity in that particular area.

It is becoming imperative to master this technology in order to achieve campaigns that truly segment the market and offer consumers what they really want and not what they say they want. Undoubtedly, this is a very powerful tool, which used in the right ethical and moral way, can help marketing to get closer to being a more accurate science. There are already companies in Spain such as Science Marketing that are dedicated exclusively to this activity, and more will surely emerge in the future. more are sure to emerge in the future in this budding market..