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What if you could read minds? I'm slowly becoming more and
more intrigued by neuromarketing and the science of being able to read a
consumer's mind.
Although, neuromarketing is nothing new. It’s been decades
since advertisers, product developers and marketers first started using social
psychology to influence what we buy. Companies have learned how to exploit
basic human behaviors, and use science to understand how consumers react to
marketing campaigns, products and eye-deceiving designs.
Traditional market research has undoubtedly brought great
success for big corporations. That’s why companies have no issue spending
millions of dollars on such studies. But as modern science and technology
develop, companies hope for even more accurate answers about consumer behavior
towards their products or services.
No company wants their product, in which they have invested
so much, to fail. That’s why big corporations have turned to neuromarketing.
Neuromarketing is a discipline that seeks to understand how marketing stimuli
impact people by observing and interpreting their emotional reactions. It focuses
on the fact that emotional processes in the brain decide the willingness to buy
something (which can better explain the term "impulse buying").
Neuromarketing service providers use neuroscience methods to
measure consumers’ neurological reactions to products, commercials, brands,
etc. Thus, companies assure maximum appeal and immense profits. Although they
may offer different services and products, the objective of all businesses is
common: to understand our brain so they can manipulate us into desiring what
they offer.
Neuromarketing enables them to do exactly that. By using
methods and tools such as EEG or MRI, neuromarketing read electrical signals
from the brain and analyze them to provide their clients with the answers they
need. For example, a standard measurement tool used by neuromarketing is the
EEG (electroencephalogram), which measures our brain’s electrical activity.
Here’s how it works.
When we are asked to think of something, our brain impulses
travel to the motor cortex and make our articulators respond. This process
happens so fast that the EEG can capture every impulse. During the half-second
from when our brain receives a stimulus, and before it reacts, there’s something entirely neurological happening
that is free from the control of the conscious (in the subconscious). It’s the
action before our conscious filters the data because of bias or societal
responsibility (think of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). The EEG promptly reads
these electrical waves and relates them to memory, emotions and attention
according to the activity in specific areas of the brain. It’s fascinating, but
this half-second will give an accurate insight of how a person feels when
watching a commercial or thinking of a product.
Neuromarketers claim that such methods are more cost
effective, but even more important -- much more efficient than traditional
methods such as focus groups. A test using neuroscience methods like EEG does
not need thousands of people to produce accurate findings. It only requires a
sample of just twenty people. The low sample number is because our brains are
remarkably similar, although there are differences between females and males or
children and seniors.
Skeptics are fearful about the use of neuromarketing and
mass manipulation over consumers. However, it can be determined that these
tests can provide companies with valuable information, unlike traditional
strategies. With neuromarketing tools they will know how to design products to
look, function and feel before they are even ready to hit the market,
minimizing risk and maximizing all resources.
Credit: entrepreneur.com
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