Is Neuromarketing the Next Phase of Advertizing?

With a decline in brand loyalty where advertising is a moving target, ad-blockers, new mediums, video applications - some things do not change. With the rise of neuroscience over the past twenty years, science is being applied to marketing in a burgeoning new field - neuromarketing. 

Measuring things like attention, engagement and their unconscious and nonverbal cues can give brands and marketers powerful signals on what works and what doesn't. 

Better Data on Purchasing Decisions 

Neuromarketing affords a new level of statistical reliability with regards to the impact of ad campaigns, web banners and video marketing on purchase decisions in different target demographies around the world. Since the patterns of response are the same everywhere, Neuromarketing can help scale enterprise level advertisement and marketing decision making with improved accuracy and data on brand engagement and marketing channel efficacy.

When in 2015, Deloitte named its top marketing trends in collaboration with WARC, Neuromarketing was named one of the top brand idea as a field of great promise into the unconscious mind to provide marketers with a trove of data about consumer preference, while avoiding the subjective bias and inaccuracies of traditional marketing research. 

Neuromarketing; Better Data for Cheaper with Higher Reliability 

Neuromarketing allows the advertising industry to move beyond polls and focus groups and scale marketing research with the help of AI with improved reliability of data that is also cheaper, thus signifying the rise of neuromarketing into the mainstream and more accessible to CMOs of enterprise brands. 

In what fields can Neuromarketing contribute a better understanding of the big picture?

• Loyalty
• Reciprocity
• Social Validation 

How to leverage social proof, free-trials, different pricing schemes and maintaining the best customer retention are some of the topics Neuromarketing can impact. 

Data on Emotional Factors in Purchasing 

Since traditional marketing research that relies on on verbal descriptions of participants is biased and often inaccurate, Neuromarketing's mission statement is to measure more verifiable and universal cues that can scale easily, such as physiological reactions to stimuli.

Eye Tracking as the Future of Neuromarketing?

 With the advent of VR soon to become implicated in product discovery, eye and facial movement tracking will be a goldmine of consumer data. Neuromarketing is best positioned in combination with machine-intelligence to scale this in the most cost effective manner.

 While the term Neuromarketing has been around for some years, and adoption rates linger around 5-10%, with the adoption by consumers of augmented reality and virtual reality interactions and immersion, this is about to change greatly. Neuromarketing therefore is on the cusp of becoming an indispensable tool in the marketer and CMO's toolkit. 

Defining Characteristics of Successful Neuromarketing 

Instead of using expensive headsets, the key is to reduce costs, scalability and mobility barriers. Using non-invasive tools such as chronometry software, that can be remotely tested via website consumer log-ins. 

In this way, traditional barriers to the adoption of Neuromarketing research are removed. Neuromarketing must be able to deliver lower costs with larger samples that target a diverse array of advertising channels. 

With virtual laboratories, Neuromarketing can occur more seamlessly and reduce the costs dramatically of case studies. Finding a "buy button" in the brain, means conceivably, the way customer analytics works in the future will take into account minute details of our behavior.  

Facial Recognition & Neuromarketing 

Local social real-time facial recognition will in the coming decades be automated. In just a few years time, machine learning's ability to do emotional facial recognition, will be much improved. In the evolution of advertising, billboards with built-in facial recognition will likely become the norm. 

While facial recognition and sentiment analytics are hot topics, it's necessarily neuromarketing via machine learning that unlocks their full potential. With location marketing and video marketing on the rise, the ROI of real-time analytics is the sweet spot as advertising and marketing converges with Big Data. 

The promise of Neuromarketing, is not just the power of the unconscious non-rational factors in buying, but of data points that so far transcend traditional marketing research metrics, as to make them obsolete. 

 This article originally appeared on Neurometric's blog. Neurometric is an intelligent marketing research company based in Montreal.

What do you think of the power of neuroscience to impact marketing and advertising in the future？Does Neuromarketing have a future?