Neuro-Marketing: Providing Conscious and Unconcious Insights For Future Content Creators

It is interesting to see the ethically bound sectors of neurology and sciences such as psychology and behaviouralism and social science stretch themselves to a re-invented dynamic business framework that is (according to business academics) as independent and ethical and unbiased as Medical Science. According to Chris Hackley, marketing academics and more generally business studies academics tend to present themselves as unbiased and independent points of reference using the protective shroud of Universities, a non-profit sector organisation. Under this sector, they fall into a paradox, creating the "sincere" feeling that they are engaging in politically and ethically neutral exercises of seeking solutions to managerial problems for the betterment of organisations, the market and the society as a whole. The paradox remains: 

How can profit seeking market approaches and theories can be neutralised and sterilised placing ethics and openness in the core of their system?

This is where new disciplines such as neuromarketing come to light to complicate and excite further the education sector and also create controversy.

Neurology or Marketing?

Behavioural economics, Consumer Behaviour, Consumer Psychology or Marketing Neurology (Neuromarketing) all are fields that refer to the very same concept. They attempt to understand and control behaviour. All the fields aim to understand and study the properties of psychosomatic, societal, perceptive and emotional issues on the financial choices of people and organisations and the effect that they have to market prices, resources and profit gains, although not always in the same focused and narrow focus. Generally, they look at behaviour in different environments and of varying experimental values using a variable number of stimuli.

Neuromarketing is seen as a highly controversial and invasive sector. New technology developments now offer new ways to intercept and study consumer psychology and neurology using non-invasive experimentation using instruments such as EEG (Electro-Encehpalo-Graphy) Caps, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanning, Iris tracking and Psychophysics. Undoubtedly this is a sector that is nascent and currently open to further study and correlation with other social and transformational fields such as VR , AR haptics among others. The question still remains is this filed another attempt by the academia to understand and interpret human behaviour and buying behaviour in particular? Is this a way to provide another insight into business and organisational approach to consumer targeting and selling?

The All Buying Brain: Neuromarketing is a profit-driven research field.

Neuromarketing can be easily seen as the filed that legitimises marketing for once and for all distinguishing it from all other sciences or art forms. This is not about aesthetics and the talk or feel of things and qualitative properties of opinion. Neuromarketing is all about the hardwiring of the brain and drawing real-time behavioural metrics using non-invasive instrumentation. For the industry practitioner this another opportunity to back up promotional projects, branding exercises to real-time behavioural data that are not contaminated by researcher bias. They are instead collected and fed by an instrument.

Marketing has been drawing “inspiration” from several fields over time, in order to satisfy the need for insight into consumer psychology. The influences came from psychology and the marketing discipline borrowed tests and theories, while they borrowed also the notion of a focus group from social researchers. These two movements are now followed by a third one now seeking to understand the human brain. Currently, neuromarketing has conquered the advertising world and publication in filed indicate almost fanatic support of what they see as the new wave of the future. This is a remarkable and rare declaration of enthusiasm expressed by academia.

Indicative of this enthusiasm is the first study of Neuromarketing in 2003 Clinton Kilts of Atlanta’s Emory University called in a team of volunteers for a series of experiments to throw light on the brain’s role in product preferences. Dr. Kilts studied the relationship between the activity in brain cells and our decision to buy by studying product preferences. Volunteers were called and were exposed to a variety of products and started a ranking exercise. Then they were later exposed to the same goods using an MRI scanner, highlighting the areas of the brain activated while they were selected.

Neuromarketing: New metrics in Digital Marketing and Content Consumption?

The concept of neuroscience, today is used in different ways in marketing. Sometimes its presence in an advertising campaign is only required in order to gain from the kudos that the name brings that is inherited from Neuroscience and neurology. As many may ignore, neuromarketing is bringing more to marketing than kudos. It brings the tools and the approach to introducing scientific experimentation to interpret neuron signals and connect them with a set purchase or brand preceptions, attitudes or other behavioural themes.

The Guardian in an article brought as an example the recent Porche advert that aimed to show an “adventurous” neuroscientific experiment, wanting to investigate that brain reacts in a similar way when flying a fighter jet and a car. According to the guardian, the whole of an experiment was a show where measurements were inaccurate and there was the absence of science. However the fact that marketing advertising is using neuromarketing…in a “creative” way, does not mean that the discipline is not a serious research area. Again it is the fact that profitability and big brands are using the name to gain their customer's attention.

Finding our Brains Pleasure Centre

In the 1950s there was a discovery made at McGill University by two researchers studying the brain of rodents. The researchers discovered an area called “the pleasure centre” located deep in the nucleus accumbens. The rats were able to self-stimulate pleasure using lever-activated electrical current, ending in pressing the level, again and again, ignoring food or sleep until the majority of the sample fell dead of exhaustion. Humans also possess pleasure centres in their brains, and for the Homo Erectus purchasing, gambling, sex amongst others are all activities that trigger stimulation of that particular part of our brain.

People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much they will pay for an item,but they are not good at assessing where the value comes from, or how and when it is influenced like store displays or brands. Neuroscience can help us understand those hidden elements of the decision process

Neuromarketing & Central Determinants of Buying Behaviour:

Neuromarketing has found a lot of applications in current brand development and attention, learning, motivational, memory and information processing as well as attitudinal and perceptual research. For example Krista Kovac etal. (2016) used EEG in an attempt to study the correlation for two central determinants of buying behaviour attitudes and perceptions. Past research Young (2002) looked at how specific moments within advertisements enable brand development and stimulate more attention. Rossiter et al. (2001) used EEG to study how certain visual scenes stimulated the fastest activation in left frontal cortices. Ioannides et al. (2000) and Ambler et al. (2000) have studied the results of a series of MEG experiments linking cognitive and affective properties in advertising and their stimulation of activity in different cortical centres. The aforementioned findings suggest that there is evidence to suggest that information arriving from the neuromarketing field can now help us to understand buying behaviours much better.

 Methodology and ToolKit

Researchers have primarily relied on consumers’ abilities to report how they feel about a distinct piece of advertising, under a confidential protocol such as face-to-face interviews, a survey, or in a group discussion setting (focus group). These methodologies present considerable limitations. They ignore personal bias assuming that people are capable of reconstructing accurately their cognitive processes, that is usually distorted by unconscious noise. In addition, there could be numerous factors hidden in the protocol of the data collection that may unconsciously motivate research participants to misconstrue the account of their feelings.

Neuromarketists use a variety of tools to work with the methodological investigation of their research problems, this may be metabolic activities happening in real-time in the brains of their subjects or by measuring electrical/magnetic activities of the neurons in synch with other activities and responses from the body ( eye tracking, galvanic skin response, facial coding, and facial electromyography). Tools working on the principle of recording may include the following tools: 

• Metabolic Activities: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) -( read) /positron emission tomography (PET)-( read)
• Electrical activities recording tools : (EEG)/event-related potential (ERP), ( buy) /magnetoencephalography (MEG), ( read) /Steady-State Topography (SST), ( read / transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)-( read)
• Other Physical Response measurements: Eye-tracking devices ( buy) /Galvanic skin response ( buy) / Facial coding (buy) /Facial electromyography (buy)

The Future of Neuromarketing in an ever-changing world of Digital social and Transformational Technology

iMotions - a company that supplies a variety of sensors focused on measuring consumer activities - provided several predictions for the ever-growing sector of neuromarketing. Firstly iMotions, alongside other companies note the widespread use of sensors on wearable technology items such as smartwatches and clothing fibres that currently receive great interest and use from the consumer community but also have been seen to carry great research value for health and sports professionals. Companies producing these non-invasive consumer sensors agree with iMotions on the future of neuromarketing.

We will see more collaboration with the integration of different research platforms that provide interdisciplinary collaboration and comparison, sharable between fields that will have a positive direct effect in the growth of such studies and thus help us understand better the human mind. There will be the potential for greater frequencies and accuracy of testing and this, in turn, will augment the willingness to trial the particular approach over other consumers traditional consumer research methods. As with big data in other fields ( Digital Marketing, Health, Business Automation etc.), we will see the increased capacity to forecast human behaviour more accurately and thus predict to some extent certain sociological phenomena. The fields of bio measures and behaviour measures will merge as the link in both fields will become clearer and as a result, our understanding of our unconscious emotional arousal and valence will be decoded and predicted more accurately and reliably than ever before.

It is inevitable that this new type of sensors will develop new data streams that will be added to the big data footprint we produce and undoubtedly this technology will help us better integrate human consciousness and unconsciousness, Human Intelligence ( HI), with Machine Intelligence (AI). It could be that neuromarketing sensors may be found in future in consumer products same as smartwatches, or perhaps be integrated into Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality hardware and feed data to these platforms. Who knows ....the future looks promising!

What are your thoughts on this? Leave comments and your thoughts and feelings on neuromarketing...