The Advent of Neuromarketing: The Rewriting of Marketing

It is time to burn a lot of textbooks on the subject of Marketing and everything related such as Consumer Behaviour, Advertising and Branding. Before you shoot me for such a taboo of a statement, consider the reality and the manifestation of Neuromarketing. It is redefining Marketing, and how companies make decisions based on what they get to know from consumers they intend to engage or serve, or rather, how they get to know what they get to know, from those consumers.

Simplified Meaning

Marketing the groom takes Neuroscience the bride, with Technology being the officiating priest and Neuromarketing is born.

You use technology including eye-tracking, biometrics, MRI, EEG, Facial Recognition and other tech, most promisingly of which being anything that amounts to Brain Computer Interface, to enable or support Neuroscientific analysis and answers to the decision-making and perception in each individual consumer that is part of a target group.

You respond with everything from product, to packaging, to pricing, to process to advertising, to after-sales support, based on the Neuroscientific assessment made possible with the Neuroscientific analysis supported by the relevant technology, and that pretty much sums up Neuromarketing.

Some would argue, Neuromarketing supplants a very significant part of Market Research as we've always known it, and Market Research being a Core Critical Component of the Marketing effort, like changing a critical ingredient in a cuisine to turn it into something else, by the supplanting a significant part of Market Research, Neuromarketing redefines Marketing altogether, changing the whole textbook - with new rules coming into play.

Not One Way Traffic

So far I have told you nothing new. Meaning, I have not done my job yet as a Professional Futurist. My job, is to tell you, something you wouldn't ordinarily already know yet. So far, I have given you an introduction, by telling you what Neuromarketing technically is, which any graduate Marketer currently working as a Marketer, today, would already know.

Now I am going to tell you, what the big companies already at the forefront, and ahead of the rest (like perhaps 99% of other other businesses), in employing Neuromarketing today, are the few so far to know, and therefore I am going to bring you up to speed on the subject, beyond the technical meaning.

One thing it is, to derive very in-depth information about your customer, such how he or she thinks about something, down to differences in thought at particularly different times, just for example. With the detailed conscious and sub-conscious thought process or brain functioning that Neuromarketing tech makes accessible to Marketers, those Marketers can also device messaging, narratives and efforts, with backing of Psychology school wisdom to very subtly or subliminally influence the thought process or subconscious inner processes of the consumer's mind. This is very feasible in practical reality, and we have already known this from the study of Conditioning, those of us who studied Marketing 101 at university. Neuromarketing, allows us to engage in the "conditioning" with much greater precision, accuracy and spontaneity.

It is like how those bogus Indian "Gurus" or Cult Leaders around the world figure out the unique loopholes in each unique psychological make-up of each unique individual to systematically exploit and manipulate that individual. I am not trying to make Neuromarketing sound wrong or unethical and I am not going to address the ethics subject to do with it either, at least not now and not herein. However, the human thought process can be manipulated, and Neuromarketing makes it very simple for any Marketer to do so with regards to consumers he or she is tasked to target, if given the access to the technology, that is already available in terms of feasibility and existence. And that technology is rapidly expanding and evolving, to offer really wide options.

The Future

The future about getting any product or service from provider to subscriber is really about individualised customisation, and Neuromarketing fits perfectly into the puzzle of things to support the mass individualised customisation of the whole process starting from need or demand identification to product conceptualisation to post-sales after-service.

Marry Neuromarketing to IoT and not as we know IoT as of 2017 in its infancy stage, but when it is in its full form, you are a looking at a future where Marketers have virtually unlimited touchpoints to constantly, continuously, spontaneously and instantly assess what each consumer is feeling or thinking at each precise moment and the probability of a buy-decision or impression. Make a love triangle by throwing Artificial Intelligence into the picture, and you have ready customised approaches to instantly and dynamically engage the consumer, individually, at the best time, to raise probabilities and possibilities of profit, from that individual consumer.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Marketing, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.