How Brands Are Using Neuromarketing To Influence Consumer Behavior

As a business owner, everyone aspires to be able to cut through the competition and procure a loyal customer base for their offered products and services. Do you think it’s possible? Well, actually, to an extent, it’s possible. By leveraging neuromarketing techniques like eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and brain imaging, you can incorporate relevant changes in your messaging, product design, and advertising to tailor the way your audience perceives your offered products and services.

Using these techniques, you can delve deeper into the consumer decision-making process by knowing about their choices and preferences. You get to know what exactly motivates them to choose one product over another. Globally recognized brands like Coca-Cola, Audi, BMW, and Apple have utilized neuromarketing to connect with customers on a large scale. Read ahead, as today we’re going to cover in detail what neuromarketing is and how it works. We will also shed light on different ways brands leverage it for their marketing purposes, along with looking at its ethical concerns.

What Is Neuromarketing And How Does It Work?

Also known as consumer neuroscience, neuromarketing is a field of study that revolves around predicting and even influencing a consumer’s behavior. It’s actually like entering the brains of your customers. For it, neuroscience techniques like brain imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalograms, and different physiological measurements like facial recognition technology are used to study how consumers react to marketing stimuli like ad copies, packaging, and product designs to understand the subconscious responses and anticipate their potential buying behavior. To comprehend their subconscious reactions, their brain activity, eye tracking, and skin responses are studied.

How Relevant Is Neuromarketing In Today’s Scenario?

In traditional marketing research, you get to survey a huge consumer group to learn about consumer behavior. What you get in response is just verbal and written feedback that lacks details about their psychological response to a marketing stimulus. Neuromarketing successfully addresses this shortcoming by providing a deep understanding of consumer behavior. The used technologies allow you to monitor their cognitive responses to marketing stimuli so that you better understand what happens inside their subconscious.

This is more of a process of diving deep into your audience’s mind, knowing why they prefer a particular product instead of its competitor’s. Based on the gained details, you can refine your marketing strategies, leading to better marketing campaigns to garner the attention of a large audience while incurring minimal cost. Eventually, it will lead you to better brand awareness and credibility.

How Brands Are Using Neuromarketing?

Brands are leveraging neuromarketing to gain understanding about consumers’ brain activity, through which they make relevant changes in their marketing strategies and products/services. It’s more of a situation where they get data about which route works the best and follow that only. From retail brands to F&B companies and media companies, everyone’s using this field of study.

Here are the common applications of neuromarketing:

1. Emotional Triggering

Using various techniques involved in neuromarketing, such as fMRI, EEG, and eye-tracking, marketers understand the brain activity of their audience. They study their brain response to different marketing stimuli that might be in an audio or visual format to trigger special emotional responses. These emotional triggers might be in the form of nostalgia, social proof, FOMO, or a simple sense of empowerment. Based on the accumulated responses, they go on refining their marketing tactics up to a point where they subconsciously convince consumers to opt for their product instead of their competitors.

2. Improvising Packaging

A brand invests a whole lot of funds to get a product’s packaging designed. If it fails to attract the target audience towards it, it’s not worth it at all. Globally renowned brands like Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, Hyundai, and Audi have successfully leveraged neuromarketing to improve their packaging. Prominent techniques that marketers use for it include EEG scans, eye-tracking, and facial recognition to learn about the neuroscience and subconscious reactions that take place inside the mind of an individual in response to different packaging designs. Based on the results, they optimize elements like imagery, color, and design layout to garner maximum attention and engagement from consumers.

3. Testing Ads Effectiveness

A/B testing is a common practice for brands to compare two distinct versions of an ad copy to see which one performs better. Again, different techniques are used to measure consumers’ subconscious reactions to the presented ad structures, based on which it’s studied which elements provoke positive emotions and hold an individual’s maximum attention. The findings are then analyzed to come up with recommendations about optimizing the ad creatives to achieve maximum impact on the viewer’s brain.

4. For Rebranding

For brands, rebranding is one of the most feasible ways of reintroducing themselves to refresh their identity and attract a new base of customers. Neuromarketing seems to be a valid and quite efficacious tool that can be utilized to guide your decisions for rebranding from start to finish. At first, they use it to understand how the consumer feels about their brand’s image, allowing them to know about the areas that hold scope for improvement. Then, based on their understanding, they make necessary improvements to craft a new brand image for themselves that can earn them increased engagement and enhanced brand awareness.

5. Website And App Design Changes

Eye-tracking and facial coding are predominantly used techniques that brands leverage to determine the areas where the user focuses the most on a website or an app. Their main goal here is to elevate user experience across their digital platforms. Based on the collected information, necessary changes are made in the digital assets to improve engagement and usability for the users.

6. Bettering Conversions Rates

The whole point of utilizing neuromarketing is to increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Brands do it just because of one thing, i.e., to boost their conversions. By using different neuroscience-based techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye-tracking, brain imaging, and electroencephalograms, brands can understand the audience’s subconscious responses to content stimuli, making it easier for them to craft campaigns that trigger positive emotions and eventually lead to more purchase decisions.

Ethical Concerns Regarding Neuromarketing

Despite being so insightful, neuromarketing as a field of study is subject to certain ethical concerns. A sort of ambiguity and worry is there regarding the privacy and confidentiality of the collected specimens. There is also uncertainty about informed consent. As neuromarketing interprets different brain responses to various marketing stimuli without even the person noticing them, critics say that it affects a consumer’s fair judgment. To address these concerns, strict regulatory authorities are needed to look after data privacy and consent procedures and work to limit the use of sensitive information.

Key Takeaways

Neuromarketing is especially beneficial for brands operating on a large scale, looking to outshine their rivals. They get insights into what happens at the subconscious level inside a consumer’s mind and what motivates them to act a certain way. Based on this collected data, brands can optimize their marketing campaigns, product designs, and branding strategies to come up with more effective and targeted marketing measures that resonate with their customers on a much deeper level. However, ethical concerns regarding neuromarketing continue to be a hot topic, raising questions about privacy, informed consent, and the possibility of forging overly persuasive marketing campaigns that could potentially reach consumers without them even noticing.

No matter how meritorious neuromarketing looks, the prevalence of online marketing practices like SEO, PPC, and SMM will never go out of trend. For your online marketing needs, consider partnering with DexDel. Based on our experience of more than 14 years, we can help you outrank your competitors and attain the top position among all search engines.