Neuromarketing: it's not what you think

Neuroscience has brand marketers lining up to out-psycho-babble each other in an effort to sound savvy on the many ways to manipulate this science. 

And who can blame them. The revolutionary advances in the study of the brain are thrilling. Neuroscience books are flooding the market. The discoveries they reveal range from how the senses can activate memory and where the belief center is located in the brain, to why you act more from impulse than reason. All of this just scratches the surface.

Business writers, consumer researchers and consultants, hoping to capitalize on this excitement, promise new ways get inside the mind of that mysterious character — the consumer.

But such reasoning often contains a fatal flaw.  The fact is: in today’s marketing it’s not just the code of the human mind you need to crack — but the artificial one — a mind whose unconscious looms over all, the Google algorithm.

Take Gmail, for example. Before your email offer ever reaches its intended target, the google brain sorts it. This “mind” renders a judgement, deciding whether your message is routed into “primary,” “social” or “promotions” buckets. So, no matter how targeted your subject line, or how astutely your message hits the neural triggers of the consumer, it may never get read.

In digital parlance your email is called spam.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s forget about algorithms. Say your offer does reach its audience. Despite its brilliance, it still may be ignored. Why? The fact is your brain has its own sorting mechanisms, some of which are not commonly studied by neuroscience.

A few examples...

In the old days of snail mail, 4-color envelopes would almost always lose. Why? Before a reader even considered what the message, graphic or offer conveyed, the brain read it as junk mail. Out it went. Instead, a more bland, business-like approach would win nearly every time.

The same principle carries over to digital advertising. There, the credibility of the message sender outweighs the look and persuasiveness of the creative, no matter how many psychic hot buttons it supposedly pushes. It’s not what it says, so much as who says it.

And what about how consumers rank their purchases? Product packaging is a science today. Brands spend time and money on package design that invokes all the senses. They use metallic and tactile finishes, even embedded codes to make the product jump into the cart.

But let’s look at toothpaste brands. For some consumers all the glitter in the world is not going to count if price is your criteria when it comes to this product. You’re never going to sway a consumer who thinks it’s healthier for your teeth and gums to invest in floss, and is happy to go generic when it comes to paste.

The late Jerry Fodor, one of the originators of the modular theory of the brain, argued that the mind takes in the world through a process. Before your brain ever considers the meaning of something, whether consciously or unconsciously, there is a more basic level of perception that deals with simple recognition.

Perhaps where the connection between neuroscience and marketing goes wrong is by aiming straight at the mind’s higher cognitive functions — and never studying what happens in the simpler parts; i.e., those aspects of perception that quickly decide yes or no.

Does neuroscience have a place in predicting consumer behavior? Of course it does, as does big data. But know this: the science behind these technologies generates a lot of hype. Just think of the 2016 election. Many people believed what the polls predicted. They awoke the next morning with this question…

What happened?

Talk to the pros who marry science and art— Jerome & Brooke Storytellers. Visit us here.