Neuromarketing is an important step towards customer-oriented marketing. With the new knowledge from brain research and neurosciences, not only marketing and communication processes can be improved, but companies can stand out from the competition in an age of information overload. Broken down to the essentials, neuromarketing means that you make subconscious buying decisions to a large extent. Emotions and the optimal combination of various factors in the consumer’s head play a central role in the choice of products and services. Neuromarketing wants to address these subconscious processes and use them for branding and brand positioning.
A redefinition of the known
The basis of classical marketing is the so-called decision theory. It looks at what steps the customer has to take before a purchase decision is made. All paths are scrutinized in detail, from entering a shop to discovering the product category on the shelf, to the checkout process. However, all of these methods are based on the assumption that a customer makes conscious and rational decisions during the purchasing process.
However, if one believes the findings from brain research, there are no conscious and rational customers at all. By discovering the limbic system and the power of the subconscious, it is assumed that customers make up to 80% of their decisions unconsciously. The assumption of classical marketing that people consciously decide for or against something is thus seemingly refuted. The consequence: Marketing must be able to address the subconscious stimuli in a multisensual way. Through music, pictures or hidden emotions.
New approaches through neuromarketing tools
If you want to develop an efficient neuromarketing strategy, the first step is to create awareness that customers can only influence their purchasing decisions rationally to a certain extent. This means for communication methods and advertising design that they must address the cognitive processes that take place automatically in the brain with all elements. If you do it right, the areas of the brain are stimulated in such a way that a positive association of the brand and a purchase is created.
However, neuromarketing should not be regarded as a miracle weapon in the fight for the best positioning in the customer’s mind. It is a new field of marketing that should not be underestimated, but neuroscientific support alone is not enough to reach the goal. As with all corporate strategies, it takes more than just a tool in the methodology box to be truly successful. But the findings of neuromarketing are a valuable tool in todays times of information overload. The findings from neuromarketing and psychology help to stand out from the crowd. Be it through priming or schema of childlike characteristic, which we have known from advertising psychology for a long time, be it the theory of colour or the psychology of acoustics. All these insights help in the fight for attention in a very noisy world.
The future of neuromarketing
Neuromarketing will be indispensable! The questions always remain: Which processes run in the head of a consumer when he sees an advertising or marketing campaign or when he is about to make a purchase decision?
In the end, it will be a hybrid of all the methods used so far. A company should never just bet on one horse, because the trend researchers and marketing experts don’t stop there. Neuromarketing as a hype will pass away. However, the fundamentals of the method will continue to exist and merge with other marketing tools. We come to a multisensory, dynamic marketing. Data plays into it, classical theorems play along, and there will always be something new added to it. But in order to be truly successful, we need to know all of this and apply it in a way that is appropriate for the target group.
