Neuromarketing For Dummies E-Book

Stephen Genco

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 674

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Learn how to use neuromarketing and understand the science behind it Neuromarketing is a controversial new field where researchers study consumers' brain responses to advertising and media. Neuromarketing and the brain sciences behind it provide new ways to look at the age-old question: why do consumers buy? Neuromarketing For Dummies goes beyond the hype to explain the latest findings in this growing and often misunderstood field, and shows business owners and marketers how neuromarketing really works and how they can use it to their advantage. You'll get a firm grasp on neuromarketing theory and how it is impacting research in advertising, in-store and online shopping, product and package design, and much more. Topics include: * How neuromarketing works * Insights from the latest neuromarketing research * How to apply neuromarketing strategies to any level of advertising or marketing, on any budget * Practical techniques to help your customers develop bonds with your products and services * The ethics of neuromarketing Neuromarketing for Dummies demystifies the topic for business owners, students, and marketers and offers practical ways it can be incorporated into your existing marketing plans.

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Neuromarketing For Dummies®

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Neuromarketing For Dummies®

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Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Foolish Assumptions

Icons Used in This Book

Beyond the Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: The Brave New World of Neuromarketing

Chapter 1: What Neuromarketing Is and Isn’t

Defining Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing versus marketing

What neuromarketing is good for

Brain science and the foundations of neuromarketing

Understanding the New Scientific Foundations of Neuromarketing

Exploring Where Marketers Are Using Neuromarketing Today

Explaining How Neuromarketing Measures Consumer Responses

Succeeding with Neuromarketing Studies

Chapter 2: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then

How We Used to Think about Consumers

The rational consumer: Mr. Spock goes shopping

Rational models for rational marketing to rational consumers

Measuring effectiveness the old-fashioned way

When rational models fail

How People Really See and Interpret the World

Forming impressions: How we take in the world around us

Determining meaning and value: Creating connections in our minds

Deliberating and analyzing: What we say when we talk to ourselves

Speaking and acting: Finally, we act! (Or maybe just talk about it)

Replacing the Rational Consumer Model with the Intuitive Consumer Model

Chapter 3: Putting Neuromarketing to Work

Building Better Brands with Neuromarketing

Brands are about connections

How brands impact our brains

Why leading brands are so hard to displace

Using neuromarketing to test brands

Designing Better Products and Packages with Neuromarketing

How new products get noticed

Neurodesign of everyday things

Neuromarketing and new product innovation

Using neuromarketing to test new product ideas

Creating Effective Ads with Neuromarketing

The direct route: Impacting the sale directly

The indirect route: Changing and reinforcing attitudes toward the brand

Using neuromarketing to test advertising

Understanding the Mind of the Shopper with Neuromarketing

Understanding the mind of the shopper

Making stores more brain-friendly

Using neuromarketing to test shopping environments

Appealing to Brains Online with Neuromarketing

Going online: Something new for the old brain

Building the perfect website

Satisfying (almost) every need online

Using neuromarketing to test online experiences

Producing Compelling Entertainment with Neuromarketing

Why our brains like stories

Neuroscience goes to the movies

Product placement in movies, TV shows, and beyond

The future of entertainment: Immersive games and simulations

Using neuromarketing to test entertainment

Chapter 4: Why Neuromarketing Matters

Potential Dangers of Neuromarketing

Reading our minds, invading our privacy

Pushing our “buy buttons”

Making us want things that aren’t good for us

Potential Benefits of Neuromarketing

Using neuromarketing to inform and educate

Making consumers’ lives a little easier

Acknowledging the value of intangible value

Learning to Live with Neuromarketing: The New Realities

Neuromarketing is here to stay

Consumers aren’t helpless

Seeing your world through a marketer’s eyes

Part II: The Essence of Neuromarketing: The Nonconscious Mind of the Consumer

Chapter 5: The Intuitive Consumer: Nonconscious Processes Underlying Consumer Behavior

The Intuitive Consumer Is a Cognitive Miser

Interpreting our world efficiently

Catching our eye with novelty

Comforting us with familiarity

Keeping things simple with processing fluency

The Nonconscious Mind Anchors Us in the Moment

The survival value of nonconscious thinking

Why we’re not conscious of our nonconscious

How we make decisions without thinking about them

The priming directive: Influence without awareness

So, What Is Consciousness Good for, Anyway?

Taking over from the nonconscious when necessary

Talking to ourselves

Thinking about the past and the future

The Three Master Variables of Neuromarketing Research

Attention: The doorway to conscious awareness

Emotion: Arousal, attraction, motivation

Memory: How we construct, retrieve, and reconstruct the past

Chapter 6: The Central Role of Emotions in Consumer Responses

Understanding Nonconscious Emotional “Markers”

Nonconscious emotions versus conscious feelings

I feel your pain: Emotions and body states

What emotions are good for

Emotions and Attention

Aiming the spotlight of attention with emotional markers

Seeing why attention sometimes isn’t so good for marketers

Emotions and Memory

Emotions make memories memorable

How we remember memories

Memory and emotional markers

Chapter 7: New Understandings of Consumer Goals and Motivation

Looking at How Goals Drive Us

The new science of motivation

Conscious and nonconscious goals

Goals and behavior

Having Goals We’re Not Aware Of

Operating under the influence of nonconscious goals

Implications of nonconscious goals

Consumer Motivation, Goal Seeking, and Goal Attainment

Approach and avoidance in the shopping aisle

Motivation and the intuitive consumer

Beyond the buying brain: Other goals marketers care about

Chapter 8: Why We Buy the Things We Buy

How People Make Decisions

Digging down into Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2

Understanding explicit and implicit decisions

Why Consumer Decisions Aren’t Rational

Judgment heuristics: The way we’re wired

Including judgment heuristics in consumer decision-making models

The Limits of Persuasive Messaging in Consumer Decision Making

Persuasion versus implicit consumer decisions

Persuasion versus judgment heuristics

Persuasion versus habit

Part III: Neuromarketing in Action

Chapter 9: Brands on the Brain

Brands Are About Connections

Seeing brands everywhere

Understanding brand “equity” and connections in memory

Experiencing a brand

How Brands Impact Our Brains

Activating nonconscious thinking with brands

Brand-building over time

Growing brain-friendly brands

Why Leading Brands Are So Hard to Displace

Taking advantage of brand leadership

Leveraging habitual buying

Understanding the upstart’s dilemma

Using Neuromarketing to Test Brands

Measuring brand equity the old-fashioned way

Probing brand connections with neuromarketing

Chapter 10: Creating Products and Packages That Please Consumers’ Brains

How New Products Get Noticed

Standing out versus blending in

Watching out for your neighbors

Leveraging emotional connections

Neurodesign of Everyday Things

We’re hard-wired for good design

Design tips from the lab

Beauty is in the wallet of the beholder

Neuromarketing and New Product Innovation

Why 80 percent of new products fail

Overcoming bias against the new

Using Neuromarketing to Test Product and Package Designs

The eyes have it: Eye tracking and design testing

Choosing in the blink of an eye

Chapter 11: Advertising Effectiveness

Two Views of How Advertising Works

The direct route: Impacting the sale directly

The indirect route: Changing and reinforcing attitudes toward the brand

Driving the Direct Route to Advertising Effectiveness

Pay attention, I’m talking to you

You are now officially persuaded

Read it back to me

Taking the Indirect Route to Advertising Effectiveness

Advertising and low-attention processing

Dissecting the feel-good ad

Catch you later: Learning without listening

Using Neuromarketing to Test Advertising

Tracking attention, high and low

Monitoring emotional reactions

Testing for the right things

Chapter 12: The Shopping Brain and In-Store Marketing

Understanding the Mind of the Shopper

Shopping: A multisensory experience

Shopping and goal pursuit

Personality and shopping styles

Making Stores More Brain-Friendly

Getting shoppers where they need to be

Making choices easier

Decreasing the pain of paying

Using Neuromarketing to Test Shopping Environments

Challenges in tracking the free-range shopper

Neuromarketing alternatives to testing in-store

Simulating the shopping experience

Chapter 13: When Consumers’ Brains Go Online

Understanding How Online Marketing Is Different

Embracing interactivity and consumer control

Aligning ads with online tasks and goals

Dissolving the gap between marketing and buying

Building the Perfect Website

How the brain consumes web pages

Website frustration, confusion, and rejection

Nonconscious processing and the online experience

Satisfying (Almost) All Our Needs Online

Online search and limitless information

Social networking and limitless sharing

Online shopping and limitless choice

How to Use Neuromarketing to Test Online Experiences and Marketing Effectiveness

Testing online ad effectiveness

Testing website ease of use

Chapter 14: Entertainment Effectiveness

Why Our Brains Like Stories

That reminds me of a story . . .

Pacing and the brain

Stories and persuasion

Neuromarketing Goes to the Movies

How movies synchronize our brains

How trailers trigger nonconscious goals

How movies influence behavior

Product Placement in Movies, TV Shows, and Beyond

Neuromarketing principles behind product placement

Product placement gets results

The Future of Entertainment: Immersive Games and Simulations

Immersion and “presence” in online and video games

Product placement in immersive games

Getting back to planet Earth: Aftereffects of game immersion

Using Neuromarketing to Test Entertainment

Measuring physiological responses to entertainment

Measuring brain and behavioral responses to entertainment

Part IV: Measuring Consumer Response with Neuromarketing

Chapter 15: Traditional Approaches: Why Not Just Ask People?

Understanding Why Asking Questions Is Risky Business

Introducing the Three Workhorses of Market Research

Conducting in-depth interviews

Seeking the wisdom of focus groups

Sampling opinions in consumer surveys

Other Ways to Ask Consumers Questions

Test marketing using experimental designs and targeted samples

Consumer panels

Observational studies

Mixing and Matching Traditional and Neuromarketing Approaches

Chapter 16: Neuromarketing Measures: Listening to Signals from the Body and the Brain

Understanding Where Neuromarketing Signals Originate

Getting to know your nervous system

Mapping neuromarketing measures to the nervous system

Capturing Signals from the Body

Interpreting facial expressions

Sensing facial muscles: Electromyography

Looking at it the right way: Eye tracking

Reading sweaty palms: Electrodermal activity

Taking a deep breath: Heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration

Racing the clock: Behavioral response times

Capturing Signals from the Brain

Listening to blood flow in the brain

Plugging into the electrical brain

Putting Technologies in Their Proper Place

Chapter 17: Neuromarketing on a Budget: Inexpensive Ways to Learn from Your Customers

Running Response-Time Studies

Seeing the logic of response-time studies

Measuring implicit brand attitudes with response-time studies

Measuring semantic and emotional connections with response-time studies

Leveraging Online Services to Tap Into the Wisdom of Crowds

Activating the webcam: Online eye tracking and facial expression analysis

Using “gamification” in online research

“Crowdsourcing” with prediction markets

Conducting Do-It-Yourself Behavioral Experiments

Setting up and running behavioral experiments

Testing behavioral economics principles in real-world settings

Balancing Costs and Benefits in Neuromarketing Studies

Chapter 18: Picking the Right Approach for Your Research Needs

Summarizing What You Can Measure with Neuromarketing

Matching Neuromarketing Approaches to Research Questions

Behavioral response-time studies

Eye tracking

Behavioral experiments

Biometrics

Electroencephalography

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

Integrating Neuromarketing and Traditional Research Approaches

Taking a big-picture view of market-research requirements

Thinking about capacity and capabilities for integrated studies

Building an organizational structure for integrated studies

Part V: Living with Neuromarketing: Practical and Ethical Considerations

Chapter 19: Five Things You Need to Know about Neuromarketing Studies and Measures

Experimental Design: Identifying How Good Experiments Work

Three questions every good experiment must answer

Knowing what to let change and what to hold constant

Measurement Theory: Understanding Validity and Reliability

Measuring the right thing and measuring it right

Improving the validity and reliability of neuromarketing metrics

Reverse Inference: Connecting Brain Measures to States of Mind

Statistical Significance: Knowing When to Believe the Results

Statistical tests commonly used in neuromarketing studies

Getting more mileage out of statistical testing

Normative Data: Linking Findings to the Real World

Friends don’t let friends make marketing decisions without normative data

Understanding how normative data puts study results in context

Chapter 20: A Pre-Flight Checklist for Successful Neuromarketing Studies

What Are Your Business Objectives for This Study?

What Hypothesis Are You Testing and What’s the Best Test to Use?

Are You Testing the Right Materials?

Are You Sampling from the Right Population?

How Will Your Results Change Your Business Actions?

Don’t Pay the Price of a Failure to Communicate

Chapter 21: Picking the Right Neuromarketing Partner

Knowing What You Need from a Neuromarketing Partner

Looking At Your Options

When to enlist a neuromarketing vendor

When to enlist a neuromarketing consultant

Neuromarketing Orientations and Specializations

Technology specialists

Integrated solution generalists

Questions to Ask a Prospective Neuromarketing Partner

Culling the herd

Selecting the winner

Chapter 22: Neuromarketing Ethics, Standards, and Public Policy Implications

Doing Neuromarketing Ethically

Protecting the rights of research participants

Representing research accurately in media and marketing

Providing evidence of validity and reliability to potential buyers

Moving the Industry toward “Neuro-Standards”

Getting past the “Wild West” of early neuromarketing

Embracing new standards for neuromarketing

Understanding Legal Issues Concerning Neuromarketing

Should neuromarketing be banned?

Balancing accountability and free speech in the marketplace

Using Neuromarketing to Make Us Healthier and Wiser

Neuromarketing and public service advertising

Neuromarketing and public policy design and implementation

Neuromarketing and education

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Chapter 23: Ten Mistaken Beliefs about Neuromarketing

Your Brain Has a “Buy Button”

Marketing Can Control You

Neuromarketing Can Implant Ideas in Your Head

Your Nonconscious Can Overrule Your Conscious Mind

Neuromarketing Will Kill Creativity in Marketing

Surveys and Focus Groups Are Dead

Neuromarketing Is Inherently Evil

Neuromarketing Isn’t Based on Real Research

Neuromarketing Is Only about Advertising

All Neuromarketers Always Tell the Truth

Chapter 24: Ten Scientific Pillars Underlying Neuromarketing

System 1 and System 2

Priming

Emotional “Somatic Markers”

Processing Fluency

Misattribution

Nonconscious Goal Pursuit

Low-Attention Processing

Implicit Memory

Implicit Decisions

Reverse Inference

About the Authors

Cheat Sheet

Introduction

Welcome to Neuromarketing For Dummies! Neuromarketing is one of those topics that a lot of people talk about, but few people really understand. It’s a brand-new field that sits at the intersection of three existing fields: marketing, market research, and brain science. In this book, we look at all these dimensions of neuromarketing, and consider its ethical and public policy implications as well.

As you dig into this book, you see that neuromarketing isn’t about magical buy buttons in the brain, or about creating zombie consumers who are powerless to resist the enticements of brain-tickling marketers. It’s about some amazing new discoveries in the brain sciences that are fundamentally changing the way we think about thinking, and are inevitably impacting how we think about buying, selling, and experiencing products and services. That’s the revolution — and the excitement — that neuromarketing represents, and it’s what we try to capture in Neuromarketing For Dummies.

About This Book

Our approach follows the tried-and-true format of the For Dummies series. We cover our topic in a modular way so you can jump in at any point and not feel lost. You can read the chapters in whatever order you like, because each chapter is self-contained. If we mention something that we cover in another chapter, we tell you where you can find more information.

Sidebars (text in gray boxes) and anything marked with the Technical Stuff icon are skippable. Finally, we made some decisions regarding terminology that may hide some deep debates among scientists and researchers, but we did so to simplify our story and save you from a lot of philosophical arguing:

We use the terms brain and mind interchangeably, even though some academics (and philosophers) would howl at such a simplification.

We use the general term brain sciences to encompass the three major branches of science we include as foundations for neuromarketing: neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics.

We often use the term consumers to describe the people neuromarketing wants to understand; sometimes we just call them people.

People who participate in studies or experiments we usually call participants, because we don’t like the clinical term subjects, although we do use that term once in a while.

Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Finally, in the grand tradition of the For Dummies series, we don’t take our subject matter or ourselves too seriously — which is particularly important for the topic of neuromarketing, because some people treat this topic as something that’s just too complicated for mere mortals to understand. Usually, when experts tell you something is too complicated for you to understand, it means you’re about to be charged a lot of money or they don’t want you to ask too many questions. We hope this book helps level the playing field between practitioners, consumers of neuromarketing services, and just plain consumers, so that everyone has a more grounded and realistic picture of what’s involved and what’s realistic to expect, in the brave new world of neuromarketing.

Foolish Assumptions

We wrote this book for anyone who has an interest in neuromarketing, so we made very few assumptions about you and what you need to know to get the most out of this book. Here are the assumptions we made:

We assume you don’t have a degree in psychology, economics, statistics, or neuroscience — but if you do, we don’t think it’ll hurt you too badly.

We assume you’re interested in how people think and why they act the way they do, even when they don’t act very rationally.

We assume you’re interested in how people are influenced by marketing and advertising, but we don’t assume you’re an expert in these fields.

We assume you’re interested in neuromarketing because you think it can help you in your business or because you think it can hurt you as a consumer. We cover both these perspectives in depth.

We assume you’re willing to consider new ideas about your own brain that may seem completely counterintuitive when you first hear them.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons are the little images in the margins of this book. We use them throughout the book to draw your attention to certain kinds of information. Here’s what each icon means:

The Tip icon marks any tidbit of information that you can use to help you apply neuromarketing principles in your business, design useful neuromarketing studies, or work successfully with a neuromarketing partner.

The most important points in each chapter are marked with the Remember icon. If you want to jump to the main points of each chapter quickly, just follow the Remember icons.

We use the Warning icon to point out things you need to look out for. These may be cautions about interpreting scientific concepts presented in the book, or advice to help you get the most out of working with neuromarketing partners.

Sometimes we can’t resist sharing some technical details with you that you really don’t need to know to understand the rest of a chapter. Often these are further details on scientific topics or particulars about how neuromarketing has been used in practice. We mark these with the Technical Stuff icon so you can skip over them if you want to. It’s your choice.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book you're reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/neuromarketing for tips on how to apply neuromarketing to advertising and information on the intuitive consumer model and how it differs from the rational consumer model (used in traditional marketing).

Where to Go from Here

Although you can jump into this book at any point, we have some recommendations for where you may want to begin:

For the basics, we recommend Chapters 1 and 2, because they provide an overview of the whole book and an introduction to the scientific foundations of neuromarketing.

If you have a particular marketing area that interests you — like branding, product design, shopping, or entertainment — you can find the chapter that addresses that area in Part III.

If you want to know how to get the most out of a neuromarketing study, check out Chapters 18 through 21.

If you want to dive into the ethical and policy implications of neuromarketing, we suggest you start with Chapters 4 and 22.

If you want to dig deeper into the brain sciences that provide the foundations for neuromarketing, we suggest two excellent introductions: Neuroscience For Dummies, by Frank Amthor, and Behavioral Economics For Dummies, by Morris Altman, PhD (both published by Wiley).

For more reading suggestions, references for all studies discussed in the book, updates and additions to book content, and pointers to training opportunities and upcoming speaking engagements, please visit the authors' website at www.intuitiveconsumer.com.

Part I

The Brave New World of Neuromarketing

In this part . . .

Here, we provide an overview of the new world of neuromarketing and the topics to be covered in more detail in the rest of the book. If you want a quick summary of what neuromarketing is and what this book is about, start here.

Neuromarketing has emerged in market research today because of some amazing new discoveries in neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics that have changed our understanding of how the human brain experiences, interprets, decides, and acts in the world. Perhaps it was inevitable that these discoveries would be applied to advertising, marketing, and consumer behavior. But there is still a lot of confusion about this new field, and more than a few misunderstandings about what it can and can’t do, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. In this part, we clear up the confusion and give you a solid foundation for understanding neuromarketing, what it’s good for, and how it’s impacting market research and marketing.

Chapter 1

What Neuromarketing Is and Isn’t

In This Chapter

Getting a definition of neuromarketing

Making sense of the science behind neuromarketing

Seeing how neuromarketing is being used today

Understanding the basics of neuromarketing measurement

Succeeding with neuromarketing research

Neuromarketing is a new field that is rapidly emerging in the world of consumer research. For some observers, it’s the “Holy Grail” of research technologies that will finally unlock the mysteries of consumer choice and behavior in the human brain. For others, it’s the root of all evil that will finally give marketers and advertisers ultimate control over our minds and pocketbooks.

So, which is it: Holy Grail or root of all evil?

As with most exaggerations, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Neuromarketing does bring some quite powerful insights and techniques into consumer research, and in this book we discuss those contributions in detail. But neuromarketing is not a technique for turning people into “zombie consumers,” and we also discuss in detail why that’s the case.

Neuromarketing is controversial, in many cases because it isn’t well understood. It’s also evolving and growing very rapidly, so it’s a moving target. At this stage in its development, there isn’t much consensus regarding what neuromarketing is, what it does, where it’s going, or what we should do about it. So, it makes sense to start with some clear definitions.

Defining Neuromarketing

Because we want this book to be a reference for all aspects of neuromarketing, our definition of the field is quite broad. We define neuromarketing as any marketing or market research activity that uses the methods and techniques of brain science or is informed by the findings or insights of brain science. (For more on brain science, see the next section.)

Ultimately, neuromarketing is about solving exactly the same problems that all types of market research aim to solve: how a company should best spend its advertising and marketing budget to communicate its value to its customers, while generating revenues and profits for its shareholders. If neuromarketing is worth its salt, it has to help marketers solve these problems better than other types of research.

In this regard, there is nothing mysterious about neuromarketing. It’s just another type of market research, subject to the same constraints of time, money, and usefulness as any other type of research that is performed every day.

Neuromarketing versus marketing

Some people believe that neuromarketing is a field devoted to influencing people to buy things — often things they don’t really need — and that it’s, therefore, a bad and dangerous thing to do.

Part of the blame for this misconception lies with the term itself. Neuromarketing sounds suspiciously like a different (and nefarious) type of marketing, but it’s not. Here’s the distinction you need to keep in mind:

Marketing is a field devoted to influencing people to like things, and ultimately to buy things, including things they may not need. Marketers are aware that people have brains. Marketing, therefore, is now and always has been devoted to influencing brains.

Neuromarketing is a new way to measure whether and how marketing is working. Neuromarketers believe it’s a better way to measure marketing because it’s based on a more realistic understanding of how consumers’ brains operate (we discuss the evidence for this claim in Chapter 2).

So, if you believe that influencing brains is a bad thing, then, in our opinion, your complaint is with marketing, not with neuromarketing.

What neuromarketing is good for

Taking this broad view of neuromarketing, there are three major ways that it can help us better understand marketing and consumer behavior:

It can tell us what’s going on in people’s brains while they’re experiencing a marketing stimulus (any marketing material presented in a controlled research test).

It can tell us how brains react to marketing stimuli presented in different situational contexts (for example, alone or next to competing products, at different price points, in a store versus online, and so on).

It can tell us how brains translate those reactions into consumer decisions and behaviors (such as buying a product or switching loyalty to a new brand).

Brain science and the foundations of neuromarketing

In this book, we use the term brain science to refer to all the scientific fields that underlie neuromarketing. We do this because we want to emphasize that the one obvious scientific source for neuromarketing — neuroscience — is not the only brain science that underlies neuromarketing. In fact, neuromarketing is built on top of at least three basic science fields, which, taken together, we refer to as the brain sciences, or simply brain science:

Neuroscience: The study of the human nervous system, including the brain, its anatomy, functions, and the peripheral nervous system it controls. Neuroscience is most relevant to understanding the brain states and physiological reactions that accompany exposure to brands, products, and marketing materials.

Behavioral economics: The study of how people make economic decisions in the real world. Behavioral economics is most relevant to understanding situational influences on consumer choice and behavior.

Social psychology: The study of how people think and act in the (real or imagined) presence of other people. In recent years, social psychology has focused on the impact of nonconscious processes on human actions. It’s most relevant to understanding how conscious and nonconscious brain processes work together in consumer choice and behavior.

Terminology: Brain or mind? Nonconscious, unconscious, or subconscious?

Brain versus mind: The word brain tends to be used when people talk about anatomical structures or circuitry in the brain. The term mind tends to be used to refer to the subjective cognitive states a brain creates. For example, the prefrontal cortex is an anatomical part of the brain, but attention is a cognitive “state of mind” produced by activity in the brain. Generally, we use these terms interchangeably. We consider “nonconscious processes in the brain” to be equivalent to “the nonconscious mind.”

Unconscious,subconscious,preconscious, and nonconscious: There is a lot of intellectual baggage associated with all the terms that can be used to refer to the “not-conscious” processes in the brain. Unconscious has some bad connotations, in terms of both the Freudian unconscious and the association with anesthetized states. Subconscious, in turn, carries a “secondary” or “subsidiary” connotation, as if it’s something below and, therefore, less than the conscious. A similar term is preconscious, which often would be perfectly appropriate, but it implies that conscious always follows preconscious, and this isn’t always true. Given all these issues, we use the more neutral term nonconscious in this book. Using this term has the benefit of referring neutrally to “everything other than conscious”; plus, it’s the term that’s becoming the standard in the academic literature.

Other important disciplines, such as neuroeconomics and cognitive psychology, underlie neuromarketing, too, but we don’t cover those fields in detail in this book. Also, each of the fields listed here is regularly spawning new subfields or merged fields, such as consumer neuroscience, consumer psychology, social neuroscience, and decision neuroscience, to name a few.

The point is that these are exciting times in the brain sciences, and neuromarketing is the beneficiary of all these fields.

Understanding the New Scientific Foundations of Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a distinctive approach to market research because it’s based on new knowledge and findings from the brain sciences. This rich and rapidly growing body of knowledge provides many new perspectives on understanding consumer behavior. We call this new view of the consumer the intuitive consumer model, as opposed to the rational consumer model that underlies most traditional market research. (We discuss these two models in detail in Chapter 2.) In this section, we offer an overview of some of the key findings that underlie the intuitive consumer model and neuromarketing.

Brain science tells us that the typical consumer is not a slow and careful deliberator when it comes to buying preferences and decisions, but instead is a cognitive miser, equipped with a brain that is adapted by evolution to conserve energy and produce fast and efficient consumer decisions and actions, not deep and logical assessments of marketing messages and purchase opportunities. Our consumer brains are attracted to both the new and the familiar, and they prefer the simple to the complex. These propensities are built into the circuitry of the brain, and they most often impact us below the level of conscious awareness.

This new picture of the human brain changes our understanding of how people see and interpret the world around them. This understanding has many implications for market research, which we introduce in Chapter 2 and cover in detail in Chapter 5. The most important of these implications is that human beings actually have very little awareness of why they do the things they do. This means that when people are asked by researchers about what they like or what they’ll buy in the future, their answers are often guesses about what they think or will do. These guesses have been shown to be no more reliable and accurate than the guesses people make every day about what other people are thinking or going to do. People aren’t lying or trying to deceive researchers when they make these guesses; they’re literally unaware of the real causes and reasons for their actions.

This finding sets the fundamental challenge for market research. It’s also the reason that neuromarketing has emerged in market research, because neuromarketing techniques hold the promise of measuring consumer responses that occur below the level of conscious awareness.

Many additional insights flow from this new science-based picture of the intuitive consumer. We focus on three more aspects of this picture in Part II: how emotions impact consumer decisions and behavior, how nonconscious goals drive decisions and actions, and how consumers really make decisions.

Modern brain science has made great strides in understanding the role of emotions in consumer behavior. Emotions operate at both conscious and nonconscious levels. They deeply impact our perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes, even when we aren’t aware of them. They heavily influence what we notice (by directing attention), as well as what we remember (by triggering memory). We cover this topic thoroughly in Chapter 6.

The way in which our brains direct us toward any kind of decision and action, including consumer decisions and actions, is through the activation, pursuit, and attainment of goals. This is the basis of the motivational system that drives us, a system that has evolved over millions of years.

What we’ve learned from brain science, mostly in the last decade, is that goals can operate nonconsciously, as well as consciously. Contrary to our conscious experience, we’re constantly activating and pursuing goals that we may have no idea exist. This finding has huge implications for marketing and consumer behavior — for both marketers and consumers. We consider these implications in Chapter 7.

Our understanding of human decision making has been revolutionized in the last 40 years. We used to see decision making as a conscious, deliberative process that could be reconstructed simply by asking a person to recount how he or she came to a particular decision. Today we know that people use different systems in the brain to make different kinds of decisions and that many decisions occur automatically, below the threshold of conscious awareness.

Consumer decisions are also highly influenced by situational factors, such as how a product is presented in a store or what other products it sits next to. These situational effects have been studied extensively in the new field of behavioral economics. A large body of research shows that these effects also often occur without conscious awareness of their impact.

With so many nonconscious influences on consumer decision making being uncovered, we need to take a new look at the power of traditional persuasion in marketing and advertising. We find that persuasion is probably less important in successful marketing and advertising than it was previously believed to be. Chapter 9 looks at consumer decision making in detail.

Neuromarketing is built on these insights and many others derived from brain science. It borrows the tools and technologies developed in the brain sciences and applies them to the world of marketing and consumer behavior. The underlying science will continue to progress, and neuromarketing will continue to benefit from this vibrant scientific foundation.

Exploring Where Marketers Are Using Neuromarketing Today

Neuromarketing is being used today by marketers in many research areas. In Part III, we tell you how it’s being used, what results are being achieved, and how it’s likely to be used in the future, in six key marketing areas:

Brand: Understanding brands and branding is an area in which neuromarketing is a natural fit. Brands are essentially ideas in the mind, and they draw their strength by making connections with other ideas in the mind. A strong brand is one that triggers deep associations with related ideas that keep that brand at “top of mind” for consumers. In Chapter 9, we show how strong connections in long-term memory make leading brands so hard to displace. We also show how neuromarketing techniques can be used to measure brand effects that consumers may not even know exist.

Product: Product innovation and package design are two research areas in which neuromarketing is making significant inroads. Because people have a hard time predicting what they’ll like or do in the future, neuromarketing provides alternative ways to observe when a new idea is resonating positively with consumers and when it’s generating a gigantic “Huh?” We cover these and other uses of neuromarketing in product and package research in Chapter 10.

Advertising: Advertising research is an active area for neuromarketing. How advertising works and what makes one ad more successful than another have always been a bit of a mystery. Neuromarketing offers new tools and techniques that illuminate, if not completely solve, this mystery. In particular, brain science leads us to the intriguing idea that ads may work best when they aren’t paid attention to, and that the repetition of positive emotional connections, rather than persuasive messaging, may be more effective at reinforcing brands and boosting sales. We discuss these and other ideas about ads and the brain in Chapter 11.

Shopping: Shopping and in-store marketing are research areas where neuromarketing has much to offer. Shoppers expend surprisingly little conscious thought in the shopping experience. They pick up a huge number of visual and other sensory cues as they navigate their shopping journey, but they usually aren’t aware of most of them. Situational factors are highly influential in determining shopping outcomes, often at the expense of shoppers’ conscious intentions. How neuromarketing can be used to test shopper reactions in both real and simulated shopping environments is covered in Chapter 12.

Online: Closely related to in-store shopping experience is online shopping experience. But there are important differences. In the online world, advertising and buying can exist right next to each other, with no need for consumers to delay gratification until they make their next trip down to the mall. As a result, the activation, pursuit, and attainment (or frustration) of consumer goals is much more immediate and dynamic in online shopping. For more details on the implications of this unique situation and how the human brain has adapted to online experience, see Chapter 13.

Entertainment: The final marketing area we explore in Part III is entertainment. Although people are better able to identify when they’re being entertained than when they’re being persuaded, they have very little conscious access to why they find one TV program, movie, or video game more entertaining than another. Brain science provides some useful insights into what makes a story interesting and how interest is represented in the brain. This opens up the possibility of neuromarketing testing of entertainment programming. We look at this research in Chapter 14.

Explaining How Neuromarketing Measures Consumer Responses

In Part IV, we shift our focus from sources and applications of neuromarketing to the basics of neuromarketing testing — how neuromarketing measurement techniques differ from traditional market research and from each other — and how they’ve been adapted from the tools and technologies of brain science.

First, we emphasize that although neuromarketers criticize some assumptions underlying traditional market research, there remains an important place for these approaches among modern research methodologies. In Chapter 15, we review the three “workhorses” of market research — interviews, focus groups, and surveys — and discuss when they make sense, and when they present risks and limitations.

Looking at the new neuromarketing research tools and techniques, we see in Chapter 16 that they fall into two general categories: approaches that measure responses of the body to marketing, and approaches that measure responses of the brain. Each approach captures a different kind of signal, and each comes with a different set of pros and cons as a measurement technology. In Chapters 16 through 18, we review these methods in detail.

The most important physiological or biometric measures (based on body signals) used in neuromarketing include the following:

Facial expressions: The human face registers a wide variety of emotional states. Facial expressions can be read at two levels: observable changes in expressions (for example, smiles or frowns) and unobservable micro-muscle changes (for example, contractions of muscles associated with positive and negative emotional reactions). Facial expression measures have been found to be robust indicators of positive or negative emotional responses (called emotional valence).

Eye tracking: The measurement of eye movements and pupil dilation while viewing an object or scene. Eye tracking has many uses in neuromarketing, both as an independent tool and as a supplement to other measures. The speed and direction of changes in gaze patterns provide valuable indicators of attention, interest, and attraction.

Electrodermal activity: A measure of perspiration on the skin, usually measured at the fingertips. The signal increases with increased emotional arousal (stimulation or excitation of the nervous system). A limitation of this measure is that it cannot distinguish between positive and negative emotional valence.

Respiration and heart rate: These measures focus on the beating speed of the heart and how deep and fast a person is breathing. Heart rate has been found to slow down momentarily when attention increases. Fast and deep breathing is associated with excitement, while shallow breathing can indicate concentration, tense anticipation, or panic and fear.

Response time: One way that nonconscious brain processes reveal themselves in behavior is by facilitating or interfering with the speed of response to word comparisons or visual choices. Response-time measures provide a simple and accessible way to test the strength of association between different concepts. They’ve been used successfully by neuromarketers in brand, product, and package testing.

Neurological or neurometric measures (based on brain signals) tend to be both more complex and more accurate than body measures. Sometimes the extra effort and cost associated with these technologies is worth it; other times not. It depends on the research question being asked. Three brain signal techniques are commonly talked about in discussions of neurological neuromarketing measures:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): This technique is the favorite of academic researchers because it enables the precise imaging of activity anywhere in the brain. It does this by measuring blood flow. When parts of the brain become active, blood flows to them. Because blood contains iron, this flow can be traced by a massive magnet that surrounds the head of the person being studied. fMRI machines are very expensive but are available at most hospitals, universities, and independent imaging centers. They’re indispensible for testing theories about how the brain works, but some neuromarketers consider fMRI — because of its cost, complexity, and artificial testing environment — to be overkill for market research testing.

Electroencephalography (EEG): Probably the most popular neuromarketing technology because of its relatively low cost and manageable equipment requirements, EEG measures the strength at the scalp of very small electrical fields generated by brain activity. It’s a well-established technology that benefits from a massive academic literature. The biggest limitation of EEG is that it can’t reliably measure changes in electrical activity deep in the brain.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG): This technique measures minute changes in magnetic fields produced by the brain. It has many advantages but requires multi-million-dollar machinery that must be super-cooled to near absolute zero to operate. It’s used in academic studies but hasn’t caught on as a practical method for commercial neuromarketing.

All these techniques are discussed in detail in Chapter 16. Their pros and cons for different types of research are covered in Chapter 18. Also in Chapter 18, we discuss how some leading companies are integrating different types of research — both neuromarketing and traditional — within a unified organizational structure to provide a single integrated, multidimensional view of consumer interests and behaviors.

Chapter 17 is devoted to the topic of neuromarketing on a budget. We describe three strategies that can be used to inexpensively gain neuromarketing insights for your business:

Response-time studies: Timing synchronization software can be used to measure response times in thousandths of a second. Whether carried out online or in a computer lab, response-time studies can provide inexpensive insights into brand associations, product “pop out” in shopping contexts, and responses to both static and dynamic advertising.

Online services (eye tracking and facial expression analysis): Online studies can now incorporate both eye tracking and facial expression recognition through the use of webcams or built-in computer cameras. Combined with clever experimental designs, gamification (putting game elements into online experiments), and crowdsourcing (using virtual betting to predict marketplace outcomes), these capabilities provide opportunities to test thousands of online study participants cheaply and quickly.

Behavioral experiments: Behavioral economics provides insights and principles about how people make decisions in real-world situations. We show how you can set up and run behavioral experiments in your store or on your website, testing the results of different configurations relatively quickly and easily.

Succeeding with Neuromarketing Studies

Part V is devoted to practical and ethical issues relating to neuromarketing research. In Chapter 19, we identify five practical aspects of neuromarketing studies that you need to understand if you want to get the most out of working with a neuromarketing vendor. Because neuromarketing is a new field, you’ll want to be sure your vendor has a solid foundation in each of these areas:

Experimental design: Is your experiment designed to efficiently test hypotheses and control for external factors that could confound or blur study results?

Measurement validity and reliability: The extent to which a vendor’s metrics have been tested to answer two key questions: Do they measure what the vendor says they measure, and are they generalizable to new samples and future situations?

Safeguards against reverse inference: This term refers to a common type of logical inference in neuromarketing studies: “If brain signal A is active, thenmental state B must be active.” But even if mental state B is always accompanied by brain signal A, it does not follow logically that “every time brain signal A is active, mental state B must also be active.” Brain signal A can be occurring for other reasons. Your vendor needs to be able to explain if and how it handles this inference challenge.

Statistical significance: Proper statistical tests need to be applied to determine the probability that a result is not produced by chance. Given the complexity of many neuromarketing designs, the proper tests are not always easy to identify.

Normative data (comparative benchmarks): Can your vendor provide data that correlates its measures with behavioral measures of marketing success? For example, advertising research companies usually provide normative data comparing scores on their metrics to product sales or other performance measures in the weeks after tested ads are shown. What normative data does your neuromarketing vendor have to show the predictive value of its measures?

We also propose that you review a simple but critical “pre-flight checklist” before committing to any neuromarketing study. The checklist consists of five questions:

Are you testing the right hypothesis?

Do you have the right experimental design?

Are you testing the right materials?

Are you sampling from the right population?

Do you know how you’ll use your results?

With the information covered in this book, we believe you’ll be fully equipped to answer each of these questions and conduct a valid, reliable, and insightful neuromarketing study. We provide more details about each question in Chapter 20.

Two lessons remain in learning how to succeed with neuromarketing studies: how to pick the right partner to help you conduct neuromarketing research, and how to make sure any neuromarketing studies you do meet the highest ethical standards.

In Chapter 21, we look at how to pick the best neuromarketing partner for your needs. As the field matures, we’re seeing the emergence of two types of partners you can consider:

Neuromarketing vendors: These are firms that perform neuromarketing studies for you, using their methodologies of choice. Each vendor brings its own expertise and experience to your study, and vendors tend to work in relative isolation from each other.

Neuromarketing consultants: These are a different breed of service providers that are beginning to appear on the neuromarketing scene. Neuromarketing consultants don’t perform studies themselves; instead, they provide advice and counsel to companies and firms that want to conduct neuromarketing studies or a larger research program but want a partner to help them do many of the things covered in this book: Pick the right vendor(s), ask the right questions, oversee the project, and provide independent interpretation of the results. Neuromarketing consultants sometimes act as general contractors, assembling the research team, providing oversight of the project, and helping integrate the results into your business decision making.

Details about these two types of partners and the pros and cons of using each are discussed in detail in Chapter 21.

For some potential users of neuromarketing, the most important issues surrounding its adoption are ethical, not methodological or organizational. Due to the controversies that have followed neuromarketing over the years, many marketers want to know if neuromarketing has the same ethical foundations and standards that other market research disciplines have.

In Chapter 22, we outline a set of ethical safeguards and principles that we believe every neuromarketing vendor should adopt to ensure that every study is safe, accurately portrayed, and trustworthy. Many of these safeguards and principles have been introduced by others, including distinguished neuro-ethicists. We summarize them under three key principles:

Protecting the rights of research participants, including confidentiality, full disclosure, and safety, in line with human subjects guidelines of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and other regulatory agencies around the world

Representing research and results fairly and accurately in all media and marketing communications

Providing evidence for the validity and reliability of all neurometric and biometric measures to potential buyers of neuromarketing services

In addition, we discuss the emergence of industry standards for neuromarketing from research organizations such as ESOMAR (www.esomar.org) and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF; www.thearf.org). We look in detail at the neuro-standards initiative for advertising research launched by the ARF and sponsored by some of the most respected advertisers in the world.

Finally, we revisit some important legal, social, and policy questions relating to neuromarketing. We argue, based on the evidence we’ve assembled in this book, that neuromarketing is a legitimate form of market research that will continue to increase in popularity and provide value to the marketing community. It isn’t brainwashing or a conspiracy to make people over-buy or over-consume. It needs to be conducted ethically under the same standards as any other research methodology. We’re optimistic about the future of neuromarketing and believe it can be a source of good for society. We close Part V by discussing three areas where neuromarketing can have a positive impact on public policy: in public service advertising, in public policy design and implementation, and in education.

Neuromarketing is a new way to think about marketing. It has emerged over the last decade because the brain sciences — especially the fields of neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology — have provided us with a new and challenging picture of how human beings think, decide, and act in the real world. It was just a matter of time before this picture would be applied to consumer behavior. As we show in the next chapter, what it tells us is that much of what we thought was true about consumer thinking and behavior is actually wrong.

Chapter 2

What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then

In This Chapter

Understanding how consumer behavior has been viewed and tested for years

Discovering how people perceive and interpret the world around them

Thinking about people as intuitive consumers, not rational consumers

Understanding neuromarketing means accepting some radical new ideas that are very different from traditional ways of thinking about consumers, marketing, and advertising. Neuromarketing asks marketing professionals to look at what they do in a very different way.

In this chapter, we give you all the basics you need to know about the old way of thinking about thinking, and the new way that led to neuromarketing. We start by looking at advertising, because advertising research was the first type of marketing research to appear. We review how people have looked at advertising for years, so you have a sense of how this kind of research developed. We show that this research was based on a picture of how the consumer thought and made decisions, called the rational consumer model. Then we show you what brain science has discovered about how people actually perceive and interpret the world — because when you understand that, you know why neuromarketing has emerged hand-in-hand with the new science. Finally, we end the chapter by proposing a new way of thinking about the consumer, the intuitive consumer model.

How We Used to Think about Consumers

In the “good old days” — before brain science started making things more complicated — marketers tended to think of consumers as basically rational information processors, with a little bit of irrational emotion thrown in. This rational consumer model may remind you of a character from Star Trek, pointy-eared and super-logical Mr. Spock. In this section, we use Spock to explain the rational consumer model. Then we explain how early ideas about advertising and marketing were designed around this model of the consumer. We delve into how the effectiveness of marketing and advertising was tested. And we point out the flaws of this old way of viewing consumers.

The rational consumer: Mr. Spock goes shopping

Mr. Spock aspires to be a purely rational and logical decision maker, often to the irritation of fellow crewman Dr. McCoy, the ship’s physician, who relies more on emotions to make decisions. Although consumers actually act a lot more like Dr. McCoy than Mr. Spock, the rational consumer model was the gold standard for years. Consider the attributes that logical Mr. Spock would bring to the shopping experience:

Mr. Spock thinks in terms of information. His brain seeks information, stores information, and retrieves information to make decisions. Emotions play no important role in these processes. Mr. Spock is aware of different brands and products because he’s been collecting and remembering information about them throughout his lifetime.

Mr. Spock can retrieve this information, completely and accurately, at any point after he has encountered it. His brain operates like a computer hard drive.

Mr. Spock rationally determines his preferences. Among any set of alternatives, Mr. Spock’s preferences are clear, unambiguous, and unchanging (as long as the attributes of the alternatives don’t change).

Mr. Spock uses cost-benefit calculations to make a purchase decision at the point of purchase. These calculations determine, for example, whether Mr. Spock will place brand A or brand B in his shopping cart.

Mr. Spock’s preferences can be changed if, and only if, he is presented with new information that alters his beliefs about products. Mr. Spock can be influenced to change his behavior, but only if he’s persuaded that his previous beliefs were wrong.

Marketing and advertising communications are messages that present rational, logical arguments about brands and products. These communications are designed to persuade Mr. Spock to choose product A over product B at the point of purchase.

The only way marketing and advertising communications can influence Mr. Spock is if he consciously recalls their persuasive arguments. When he remembers them, he can apply them in his purchase decision cost-benefit calculation.

Modern neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics have raised powerful objections to each of these assumptions. In the next section, we show how these assumptions have impacted marketing and advertising research for over a century.

Rational models for rational marketing to rational consumers

Early pioneers of marketing and advertising research must have had something very similar to this rational consumer model in mind when they formulated the first “advertising effectiveness” theories at the start of the 20th century. These theories were derived from the best model of successful persuasion available at the time, the door-to-door salesman.

In 1903, advertising was famously defined as “salesmanship in print.” Most advertising in those early days was designed to simulate the door-to-door salesman — rapidly conveying a persuasive message for the purpose of converting a prospect into a buyer. Selling through advertising was viewed as a rational, information-based process with no place for emotional appeals or what we now call “creative” in advertising. Like a good door-to-door salesman, a good ad delivered as much information as required, made a persuasive argument for the product, and then explained how to buy the product. That was how it worked.

The AIDA model was one of the first translations of sales strategy into advertising strategy. It’s usually attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis, who formulated it in various writings over the first decade of the 20th century. Lewis’s insight was that advertising worked through a hierarchy of effects that had to be achieved in a fixed order to produce positive results. The acronym for this model was AIDA, derived from each of the four steps:

1. Attention: First, make your customer aware of your product.

2. Interest: Next, pique your customer’s interest by demonstrating the advantages and benefits of your product.

3. Desire: When interest is established, convince your customer that he or she wants or desires your product to satisfy his or her needs.

4. Action: Finally, lead your customer to take the actions required to purchase your product.

Several other models were developed over the following decades by both academics and practitioners that presented different kinds of hierarchy of effects models, all of which were variations of the original AIDA model. For example, in 1961 Roger Colley wrote that “advertising moves people from unawareness, to awareness, to comprehension, to conviction, to desire, to action.”

All these formulas for advertising success viewed the consumer as a rational, information-processing Mr. Spock. Information triggered attention, generated interest, drove desire, and motivated action. The trick of advertising (and later, marketing) was to send messages to the consumer that would guide this journey from unawareness to purchase. The trick of advertising and marketing research, in turn, was to measure whether these effects were occurring.

Measuring effectiveness the old-fashioned way

Over the last century, researchers developed and refined various tools and methodologies to test marketing and advertising effectiveness based on the principles covered in the previous sections. Because researchers believed that the rational consumer was engaged in conscious, rational calculations, the natural way for them to learn about those calculations was to ask consumers what they were thinking.

Three methodological traditions form the bedrock of traditional market research techniques used to gather information about what consumers think about messages, products, and brands:

Interviews: Interviewing techniques include a wide variety of methods, from quick mall intercepts to intensive “depth interviews” that probe the deep sources of consumer desires and needs. All are characterized by a face-to-face interaction between a subject (the person being interviewed) and an interviewer (the person asking the questions).

Focus groups: