[{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2020\/01\/08\/neuromarketing-definition\/#Article","articleBody":"\u201cNothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.\u201d \u2014Victor Hugo. Hugo wasn\u2019t talking about how neuromarketing is set to transform the future of customer experience while closing the experience gap with the power of AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things.\nObviously.\nBut the sentiment still applies.\nThe more neuroscientists learn about the brain, the more social psychologists understand about consumer behavior, and the more marketers can apply these insights to branding and building customer trust, the closer the time of realization regarding the power of neuromarketing gets.\nSuccessful branding relies on emotional connection\nAs the experience economy transforms, successful branding is increasingly defined by engaging customer values and connecting emotionally. Neuromarketing insights will become increasingly valuable to the over 80% of companies who plan to compete mostly or entirely based on customer experience.\nCombine these ambitions with the harsh reality of the experience gap, where 86% of companies believe that they deliver great customer experiences while only 8% of customers feel the same way, and the challenge becomes the opportunity.\nGetting a realistic understanding of customer perception and behavior will drive the innovation responsible for closing the experience gap. It\u2019s easy to see why the neuromarketing technology market and demand is forecasted to grow steadily through 2023 and beyond.\nWhat is neuromarketing?\nNeuromarketing is the scientific study of how the brain responds to branding and advertising.\nNeuromarketing uses insights from:\nNeuroscience\nBehavioral economics\nSocial psychology\nThese insights are applied to measure and improve the effectiveness of different facets of marketing, including:\nProduct design\nBranding\nMarketing practices\nWhat if you could see the neural light show when customers interact with your brand? What if you could see exactly how consumers respond to your marketing campaigns, sales teams, and customer service reps \u2013 or any aspect of your business? What areas of their brain light up when they talk to their friends about your company?\nDeeper understanding and empathy for your customers will enable you to predict their behavior more accurately and deliver the best possible customer experiences.\nNeuromarketing is bigger than creating catchy ads and compelling cues. Insights gained into human behavior can be applied across your organization, from achieving executive alignment to stronger cross-function communication and collaboration to improving employee and customer experience.\n \nFuture-proof your career: 7 ways to improve emotional intelligence\n   Emotional intelligence is what sets humans apart from AI, machine learning, and algorithms. Improve emotional intelligence and future-proof your career.  \nPsychology, neuroscience, and marketing walk into a bar\u2026\nExcept this is no joke. If variations of that opening line flashed in your mind, then you just experienced part of your System 1 brain at work as it scrolled through your archive of associated impressions, ideas, memories, and emotions \u2013 all tagged and linked in areas of your neural network.\nSystem 1 is powerful enough to have helped humans survive for millennia, and it\u2019s still with us today \u2013 receiving and sorting sensory data, decoding and deciding what\u2019s worth getting excited about and what\u2019s not. Most of that happens at a preconscious level before rising to our conscious mind as a feeling, an emotion.\nSystem 1 runs on sugar, heuristics (mental shortcuts), raw emotions, and good coffee. The most successful brands build their foundations here.\nWhy? Because our decision-making and action-taking are driven by all the feels from System 1. It\u2019s not a new revelation, especially to marketers and anyone else interested in human nature.\nIn the 1970\u2019s, Kahneman and Tversky studied how people actually make decisions. They illustrate our brain function and behavior as System 1 and System 2.\nSystem 1 is emotional, instinctual, intuitive, associative, and has adapted to making quick decisions trained on habit by using heuristics or mental shortcuts to ease cognitive load and save time and energy.\nSystem 2 is rational, slow, and deliberative, and often lazy; it\u2019s happy to let System 1 do most of the work. System 1 is street smart and System 2 is book smart.\nTraditional consumer models presumed a wholly rational customer who must be persuaded by thorough deliberation of the complete set of cold, hard facts and watertight practical logic.\nIn reality, people make decisions based on emotions and feelings at a nonconscious level, meaning we often can\u2019t articulate why we make the choices we make.\nSystem 1 processes sensory data, organizes impressions, and makes meaning by association. But the lack of conscious reasoning leaves it susceptible to the manipulative and potentially misleading effects of priming, environmental cues, and the weaknesses of biases guiding jumps to hasty conclusions and decisions.\nThis vulnerability has been known by marketers and psychologists for a long time. I wonder what part of the brain lights up with buyer\u2019s remorse after a late-night splurge of impulse purchases. (Asking for a friend).\n \nThe heart of the (gray) matter: 5 ways neuromarketing will change CX\n   Neuromarketing in CX offers the deep customer insights needed to close the experience gap and drive the evolution of business in five key areas.  \nYeah, but how does neuromarketing work? And does it work?\nSome neuromarketing methods draw from current user experience research and biometric measurement technologies used to gather data through:\nEye tracking\nFacial expression monitoring\nElectrodermal activity\nResponse time\nRespiration and heart rate to study physiological responses to stimuli\nThe contributions of neuroscience technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG) that monitor neural responses can show participant reactions that may remain unconscious.\nUnderstanding the positive or negative reactions to sensory stimuli such as colors, sounds, and other qualities can help marketers and product designers adjust design and messaging to impact customers more effectively.\nThese technologies are not that new. And their potential for deep customer insight is not a new idea. Neuromarketing has been discussed in principle for decades, and testing has been going on since the mid-2000s.\nUsing EEG and fMRI machines to measure neural response, researchers have tested the effects of branding with big brands from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Apple, and several others.\nFrito-Lay wanted to grow their market share among women. Their research using fMRI revealed that the shiny packaging stimulated the area of the brain that produces feelings of guilt and shame. This insight led to packaging redesign to change the bags from a shiny finish to a matte finish, which increased sales.\n \nThe case for EQ: Why emotional intelligence in business matters\n   Emotional intelligence in business boosts productivity, employee engagement, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profits, so it's no wonder EQ has the attention of the business world.  \nBack again for the first time: A portrait of neuromarketing as a young discipline\nNeuromarketing has not yet fully matured, but it has come a long way in just a few years. Another five to ten years could make all the difference. The prohibitive cost will come down as technology improves and firms compete. Results and actionable insights will grow more reliable, valuable, and attainable.\nSome dismiss neuromarketing as useless because they see it as merely confirming what traditional marketing research already knows. Writing it off may be fair if the field is supposed to be fully mature, but neuromarketing is just now coming into its own.\nNeuroscience and the technologies available to neuroscience and marketing continue to develop.\nThis makes the confirmation of existing knowledge look a lot like confirmation of the potential for a more developed and mature neuromarketing.\nA productive use of the meantime would be to figure out the inevitable ethical and regulatory questions including data privacy and security, especially with the GDPR and ongoing data breach scandals so fresh in our digital cultural memory.\nThe potential for neuromarketing to further innovate the digital transformation of business and elevate what it means to be an intelligent enterprise is vast. With an exponentially deeper understanding of your customers\u2019 needs, wants, desires, intentions, and behaviors integrated into your already robust customer profiles, it\u2019s hard to overestimate the competitive advantage afforded by this new dimension of customer insight.\nCreating exceptional emotional experiences that are individualized on an unprecedented scale, in an appropriate and ethically transparent way that pleases your customers while understanding, respecting, and aligning with their values and their expectations \u2013 that\u2019s the potential of neuromarketing to usher in the next generation of CX as the values and emotion economy continues to evolve.\nClosing the experience gap is only the beginning.\nStand out from the crowd by understanding your customers, keeping your promises, and protecting consumer data. Learn how HERE.","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2020\/01\/08\/neuromarketing-definition\/#Article_Person","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2020\/01\/08\/neuromarketing-definition\/#Article_Person_ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/23x6xj3o92m9361dbu2ij362-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Josh-Maday-profile-pic-150x150.jpg"},"name":"Josh Maday","sameAs":["https:\/\/twitter.com\/JoshMaday","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/josh-maday-a703a814\/"],"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/josh-maday\/"},"dateModified":"2021-12-28T14:16:34+00:00","datePublished":"2020-01-08T08:00:00+00:00","description":"Neuromarketing is the scientific study of how the brain responds to branding and advertising, applying neuropsychology to marketing research.","headline":"What is neuromarketing? How your brain responds to branding","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2020\/01\/08\/neuromarketing-definition\/#Article_ImageObject","height":"630","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/thumbnail-1ef451a86151639cfaec8eb6d219b76a-1200x630.jpeg","width":"1200"},"mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2020\/01\/08\/neuromarketing-definition\/","name":"What is neuromarketing? 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