Steve is a writer, speaker, researcher, and marketing consultant. He is author of Intuitive Marketing (2019), a study of persuasion and influence in marketing theory and practice, and co-author of Neuromarketing for Dummies (2013), a comprehensive overview of neuromarketing science, applications, methodologies, and ethics. He is Managing Partner at Intuitive Consumer Insights, where he focuses on marketing education and consulting.
Progress in computing power has enabled game designers to create highly realistic and immersive games. Unlike movies, games give the player direct control over the storyline, combining immersion with both control and interactivity. The degree to which the player feels immersed into the game is called presence. Immersion and “presence” in online and video gaming […]
Products seem to be popping up everywhere in entertainment these days. Not just in movies and TV shows, where they’ve become standard fare, but in other kinds of media as well, such as video games, music videos, online videos, magazine articles, and clothing. They’ve even begun to appear in places that would’ve been unthinkable only […]
When Peter Steidl, Andrew Pohlmann, and I wrote Neuromarketing for Dummies back in 2013, we took to heart the “for Dummies” axiom that we were writing for people who might have no previous experience with our topic. So we presented a bottom-up overview that was both broad and shallow. We tried to communicate the wide […]
Research has shown that a story can activate empathy. Through a system in the brain called mirror neurons, we can feel what characters in the story feel. As the story draws us in, our emotions are connected to the story, suppressing our awareness of our actual surroundings. This causes us to leave reality and enjoy […]
The Internet raises some interesting issues with regard to how it enables us to satisfy some of our most basic human needs in ways that were impossible before it came along. Three such changes are discussed in Chapter 13 (“When Consumers’ Brains Go Online”): How we search for information Just about everything we do online […]
Neuromarketing can make a contribution to website design in three powerful ways: Help designers understand how people’s brains actually consume web pages Eye tracking applied to website viewing has shown that gaze patterns are determined by two types of attention: Bottom-up attention: This type of attention is involuntary and automatic. When viewing websites, bottom-up attention […]
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 […]
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 […]