The Internet is something new (at least for our brains, which evolved in a world of physical reality). Neuromarketing is something new. You’d think that these two new things would’ve gotten together, but so far, neuromarketing hasn’t been applied to online topics nearly as much as it has been applied to more traditional topics, like […]
Retailers can influence three aspects of shopping to make their stores more brain-friendly. All three can benefit from neuromarketing insights and can be assessed with neuromarketing methods: Finding: Stores need to help shoppers find what they’re looking for, as well as discover new things that they may not be looking for. Choosing: Stores need to […]
Shopping is a complex experience that begins with goals and expectations in the mind of the shopper and ends with a decision to buy or not to buy. In between, it’s a physical experience that involves navigating through physical space, activating all our senses, and weighing lots of alternatives. Shopping can be, and often is, […]
Neuromarketing offers a very different perspective on advertising research than is found in traditional research methodologies. This new perspective embraces new answers to what might be called the three fundamental questions of advertising research: What is the purpose of advertising? How does advertising achieve its purpose? How can we best measure advertising effectiveness? According to […]
Why do so many new products fail? Neuromarketing tells us there are two underlying problems: People are terrible at predicting what they’ll do in the future. People are attracted to the novelty of new products, but they’re a little bit uncomfortable with that novelty. Behavioral economics, one of the disciplines underlying neuromarketing, has addressed the […]
Neuromarketing has been applied extensively in product and package design, in part because people find it very hard to articulate why they like or don’t like a design, and in part because people are very poor predictors of their future buying behavior. Here’s how neuromarketing can help marketers and product designers answer questions: How do […]
Neuromarketing has been applied to the problem of understanding why upstart brands have such a hard time displacing leading brands in a mature category. From a neuromarketing perspective, one reason is because leading brands tend to have a much more diverse and highly connected brand memory network. Because the leading brand “comes to mind” more […]
This is the first in a series of posts on the application of neuromarketing in seven marketing areas: branding, product innovation and development, advertising, retail shopping, online shopping, and entertainment. Neuromarketing and branding were made for each other. Both are fundamentally concerned with how ideas are established and linked in the human mind. When first […]
Recently one of my favorite neuromarketing methodologies, automated facial coding (AFC), seems to have burst into the research mainstream. Within one week in January, Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder of Affectiva, was the recipient of a glowing profile in the New Yorker and Paul Ekman, undisputed guru of facial coding and scientific advisor to Emotient, received […]
Much of the fear expressed by critics of neuromarketing seems to be based on an implicit assumption that consumers need to be protected from neuromarketing because they’re weak and passive and, therefore, easy dupes of wily and clever marketers. This is an ironic assessment, because if these critics took the time to understand the brain […]
Five intuitive marketing principles marketers can start using today
In a recent article promoting my new book, Intuitive Marketing, I outlined some common mistakes marketers make when they try too hard to persuade consumers to buy their products and brands. That advice was necessarily negative—it described what not to do. Now I’d like to consider the opposite question: what are some positive ways marketers […]
The Mere Exposure Effect is Not a Silver Bullet for Marketers
Robert Zajonc first published his findings about the mere exposure effect in 1968. In an article titled “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” he described a series of experimental findings that fundamentally challenged the psychological understanding of preferences accepted at the time. According to that understanding, preferences were a result of conscious thinking. Cognitions were believed […]
How Consistency, Reliability, and Trust Achieve Influence Without Persuasion
In the traditional model of persuasive marketing, the purpose of marketing is assumed to be the achievement of short-term transactional persuasion. In the newer model of intuitive marketing, the purpose of marketing is seen as something very different: the achievement of long-term influence through deep and authentic customer relationships. When adopting the intuitive marketing perspective, […]
What Do Replication Failures Tell Us About Priming?
Despite extensive evidence for priming in general and behavior priming in particular, there has emerged in recent years a backlash against this research, based largely on the publication of a number of replication failures of highly-cited priming studies.[1] Some observers have suggested these results are symptomatic of a deeper replication crisis (sometimes called a reproducibility […]
10 mistakes persuasive marketing makes (and intuitive marketing avoids)
My book, Intuitive Marketing, challenges a fundamental assumption of traditional marketing—that the purpose of marketing (and advertising) is to persuade. I knew when I started this project in late 2014 that two things were true: First, marketing and advertising were starting to bug me. They were becoming more disruptive and intrusive every day and marketers […]
Science under the hood 5: Implicit decisions, Reverse inference
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Implicit decisions As we establish in Chapter 1 (“What Neuromarketing Is and Isn’t”) and elaborate on throughout this book, human brains are cognitive misers — thinking is hard and we try to avoid it if we can. A particularly […]
Science under the hood 4: Low attention processing, Implicit memory
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Low attention processing Another counterintuitive finding that is important to neuromarketing is the discovery that attention may not be good for advertising effectiveness. Attention would seem to be a necessary condition for advertising effectiveness, but brain research has shown […]
Science under the hood 3: Misattribution, Nonconscious goal pursuit
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Misattribution One of the things scientists have learned from studying System 1 and System 2 processes separately is that System 1 is sloppy. It makes connections and guides behavior based on simple associations, not logic. When System 1 makes […]
Science under the hood 2: Emotional “somatic markers,” Processing fluency
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. Emotional “somatic markers” Emotions operate at two levels in our mental lives: one conscious, the other non- conscious. Conscious emotions are what we usually call feelings. Nonconscious emotions are what psychologists call affective states, and they include emotional somatic […]
Science under the hood 1: System 1 and System 2, Priming
This post is part of a series covering the 10 most important scientific principles underlying neuromarketing. System 1 and System 2 Daniel Kahneman didn’t invent the System 1–System 2 model of brain processes, but his work over the last several decades has popularized it as one of the most useful overarching frameworks for understanding how […]