SALE! Everywhere you look these days. Are these campaigns and advertisements simple sales strategies or is this already brain manipulation?
 |
| Source: Laura Moreno Velasquez |
When
you go shopping, do you end up buying much more than you had planned?
Our mind is active and receptive all the time to different auditory,
visual, and even olfactory stimuli. Companies and sellers know exactly
how to get our attention. Have you noticed for instance how you have to
cross the entire store just to go to another floor or to reach basic
items?
Marketing
has always sought to understand not only the needs of consumers but
also their preferences and emotions in order to improve advertising and
sales. Given the difficulties that marketers have faced trying to
measure our minds and especially our emotions, the new discipline 'neuromarketing' has emerged.
Inside the Consumer's Brain
Neuromarketing
is “a multidisciplinary field of research whose aim is to investigate
the consumer's reaction to advertisements from a neuroscientific
perspective” [1]. In other words, neuromarketing applies specialized and
well-known techniques in neurosciences such as electroencephalography,
galvanic skin response, electromyography, functional magnetic resonance
imaging, and eye tracking in order to measure and analyze emotion,
attention, and the memory of consumers and try to unravel how our brains
decide what to buy [1].
Only 15% of our decisions are made consciously
At
least 70% of new products launched worldwide, tested by traditional
techniques like interviews or surveys, fail within the first six months
[2]. This happens because only 15% of our decisions are made
consciously, whereas the rest is decided by our subconscious [3].
Neuromarketing seeks to be more accurate than traditional methods by
measuring the unconscious and spontaneous reactions of the consumers
when they are confronted with diverse stimuli.
Neuromarketing vs Neuroeconomics
Neuromarketing
is often compared to and confused with neuroeconomics. While
neuroeconomics focuses on individual and group choice, judgment, and
decision-making, neuromarketing investigates how a distribution of
choices can be influenced or shifted from one pattern to another [4].
This
is where I start to wonder about the real purpose of neuromarketing. It
is not any more about understanding our minds in order to satisfy our
necessities, but about finding a way to manipulate our choices simply to
boost consumerism. Neuromarketing is not necessarily intended to
benefit the consumer by offering better products. Its main purpose is to
enrich companies or sellers at the expense of the consumer.
Neuromarketing’s Challenges
Being a very recent discipline, while promising, it faces some challenges to overcome. First,
implemented techniques require high cost equipment, which makes it
unapproachable for small companies. Besides, these techniques can be
also very invasive for the participants of the study.
Second,
there are no defined standards yet for either measurements or analysis.
Thus, any result can change based on the methods applied, measured
parameters, and most importantly, the analysis of the data, depending on
the scientist behind the research.
Personally,
I think ethics is the major problem to be solved in neuromarketing. On
the one hand, data is taken directly from our brain and I am not sure
how comfortable people feel being literally “read”, particularly because
this information could be used widely for many other purposes, besides
sales, as you can imagine. On the other hand, neuromarketing techniques
are closely associated with the manipulation of our brain and, as
already mentioned, we - as consumers - don’t even benefit from it.
Therefore, if this field wants to survive, grow and attract people, it
should start redefining itself and offering a real contribution to
society.
[1] Vecchiato et al., Comput Math Methods Med, 2014
[4] Breiter et al., Front Hum Neurosci, 2015
by Laura Moreno Velasquez, PhD Student AG Schmitz
No comments:
Post a Comment