Neuromarketing combines neuroscience, social psychology, and market research to inform advertising, product design, pricing, and other important decisions. Confidence with neuromarketing for both B2C and B2B is increasing, and its usage is accelerating.
Do you stand out in a crowded marketplace? Marketing is essential for understanding consumer preferences. However, traditional marketing alone doesn’t provide the consumer insight needed for today’s business survival.
Understanding Customer Motivations
What is neuromarketing? Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing strategy formed around the physiological and neural signals of consumers in response to product stimuli. This data offers real-time reactions to anything from viewing or using the product to selecting features or preferred packaging. By studying human emotions and behavioral patterns, companies are given an advantage by knowing what a customer really wants. Combined with other tools like eye trackers and surveys, brands can gain unique insights into both conscious and subconscious buying preferences for your target audience.
A neuromarketing study is now one of the most reliable market research methods for marketers. Thanks to advances in technology, it is also surprisingly portable and affordable. No laboratory required.
Neuromarketing Tools
Neuromarketing is an advanced consumer research technique that measures physiological responses. Common tools include:
Electroencephalography (EEG)
EEG measures the electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain. EEG sensors are placed on a participant’s head, then the electrodes non-invasively detect brainwaves from the subject.
EEG sensors can record up to several thousands of snapshots of the electrical activity generated in the brain within a single second. The recorded brainwaves are sent to amplifiers, then to a computer or the cloud to process the data. The amplified signals, which resemble wavy lines, can be recorded on a computer, mobile device, or on a cloud database.
In addition to traditional “swim cap” EEG sensors used in a laboratory setting, EMOTIV has democratized brain research by inventing wireless, lightweight and affordable EEG headsets that take mere minutes to set up.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
fMRI measures blood flow to key areas of the brain to measure activity. Machines can cost upwards of a half million dollars, making it less accessible for consumer research.
Facial encoding
This consumer research technique uses a camera to record a participant’s facial expressions.
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking uses a camera to track the participant’s eye movements and visual attention, such as how long they view something. This tool is especially useful for evaluating UX and visual mediums.
Electrodermal activity (EDA)
EDA uses sensors on the hand to measure sympathetic nerve activity in the sweat glands.
Translating Data into Action
As a leader in the EEG space for over a decade, EMOTIV has introduced six different EEG systems ranging between two and 32 channels. Our Performance Metrics measure and translate neurophysiological states of cognition and effectiveness across the domains of engagement, attention, interest, and cognitive stress.
Why Neuromarketing is on the Rise
Neuromarketing studies have been around since the 1990s, but its usage has grown exponentially as the technology has become more accessible and affordable to marketing teams. With traditional marketing, participants’ responses can be subjective or biased, while neuroscience can reduce any uncertainty and conjecture. Neuromarketing fills in the gaps left behind by traditional marketing methods, for the benefit of both producers and consumers alike. In time, traditional marketing will be supplemented by neuromarketing.
“What should be particularly exciting to marketers is the possibility that only a small number of people may be able to
Who Uses Consumer Neuroscience?
A number of successful organizations have use neuromarketing to boost their sales including Microsoft, and Google. Coca-Cola, Target, and Netflix, for example, use red as a main component in their brand identities to represent power, excitement, energy and passion. Hyundai has been known to use EEG as a testing ground for new vehicles.
“We want to know what consumers think about a car before we start manufacturing thousands of them,” Dean Macko, manager of brand strategy at Hyundai Motor America, explained to Forbes.
There is an abundance of examples of neuromarketing as the technological innovation community continues its dynamic research into neuroscience applications. Gaining unbiased results from neural activity has become a fascinating and reliable method of planning a marketing strategy.
Representative Diagram
Above: “How Neuromarketing Works” by Nick Lee
Is Neuromarketing Ethical?
EMOTIV adheres to best neuroethics practices, designing our hardware and software products with privacy and security in mind. Brainwaves are recorded digitally by our headsets, encrypted, and transmitted wirelessly to our software which decodes cognitive and affective states. Data is always transmitted and stored in encrypted form, saved to our cloud servers in an anonymous data store.
The technology cannot decode individual thoughts or their content. EMOTIV is fully GDPR compliant, and it does not sell or give data to any third party without explicit consent. If you give EMOTIV permission to aggregate or share your EEG data, the data is stripped of any personally identifiable information to ensure user privacy. EMOTIV is actively working to advance neuroscience technology to meet the highest global standards in neuroethics. View our Privacy Policy.
Choose EMOTIV as Your Neuromarketing Partner
Neuroscience has become a powerful tool in consumer insight market research, capable of capturing brain activity at the speed of cognition. EMOTIV offers a full suite of hardware and software solutions for EEG Neuromarketing research. We can even design experiments and recruit participants for your campaign.
EMOTIV offers robust software solutions with a suite of algorithms that can detect human emotion(s). Using these tools, market researchers can analyze real-time bioinformatics or download datasets for further analysis. They can also integrate biometric sensors like facial expression and eye-tracking analyses with EEG measurements for a comprehensive neuromarketing platform. Want to let us do the heavy lifting? Take advantage of Research as a Service (RaaS).
