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 […]
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 […]
Two kinds of expressions are critical to marketing and market research: Verbal expression: Self-reporting of opinions, attitudes, preferences, and predictions of future behavior Consumer behavior: Shopping, buying, and using products and services Market researchers used to think that these two kinds of expressions were closely connected. The rational consumer model assumes that all our decisions […]
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 […]
An Introduction to Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience by Thomas Ramsøy — the most thorough, yet accessible, scientific introduction to the field yet written. Originally posted on GreenBook Blog, August 12, 2014. Editor’s Note: Dr. Thomas Ramsøy is a friend, frequent blog contributor, and one of the most brilliant people that I have ever met. It’s with very great […]
Combining self-reporting and nonconscious measures is something everybody agrees is A GOOD THING, but nobody seems to say much about how to do it, or how not to do it. I recently came across a terrific exception — Robert Potter and Paul Bolls’ 2011 book with the mouthful title Psychophysiological Measurement and Meaning: Cognitive and […]
(This post comes from a long time ago, July 5, 2008, but represents some issues that are still relevant today, including the important problem of reverse inference.) Eventually the chickens come home to roost. Or insert your favorite aphorism here. It looks like a full backlash is officially underway regarding some of the more, shall […]
Public opinion polling has, well, issues that it needs to work through. Cengiz Erisen got his PhD in political science at SUNY Stony Brook in 2009. He recently published an article based on his dissertation in Political Psychology, co-authored with two of his Stony Brook professors, Milton Lodge and Charles Tabor. Titled “Affective Contagion in Effortful Political […]
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 […]