Neuromarketing: a step further

Host: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Trariti Consulting Group podcast. We will be broadcasting on various topics and issues facing businesses in turbulent times - the unprecedented contemporary challenges and strategies to deal with them. It is time to step back, reflect, and prepare to face the future. The Trariti Consulting Group podcast series will address wide-ranging topics focused on best practices in Management and a career in Management consulting.

Moderator: Harshitha, thank you for joining us again for a discussion on Neuromarketing. So, Harshitha, you have given us great understanding of Neuromarketing in your previous episode. Now, can you help us give some examples of Neuromarketing?

Harshitha:-Firstly, thank you for inviting me again; as we discussed in the previous episode, ?Neuromarketing is an emerging interdisciplinary subject which touches the border of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing.

Well, I will start with a small case today and help you explore more on how Neuromarketing has its hand on packaging.

Soup is probably not one of your favorite foods. Sure, a hot cup of soup is comforting after a freezing day out of the driveway, but it's usually an afterthought or a short appetizer before a more exciting main meal. Campbell Soup Corporation, like Campbell's, is a processed food and snack company based in the United States. Andy Warhol's series of Campbell's Soup Cans prints characterized the traditional red-and-white design. The company was doing well and had a good market share. Campbell's purpose in using Neuromarketing was to understand what made people buy soups first and then reinforce or improve those features. Several obstacles impeded Campbell's marketing efforts.

To begin with, people were uninterested in soup, making market research difficult. They also discovered that typical market research methodologies such as inquiring about ad memory and intent to purchase tended to have a weak correlation with actual customer behavior. As a result, they began researching Neuromarketing and biometrics.

With the help of Neuromarketing, Campbell Soup Company advertised a bold redesign of their famous label. Experts immediately forecast the company's demise, accusing it of relying on pseudoscience. Is it true that Campbell spent two years investigating "microscopic variations in skin moisture, heart rate, and other biometrics to see how customers react to anything from photos of soup bowls to logo design?" Is it true that Campbell's would make such an irrational decision based on only 40 factors and choose new technology above tried-and-true consumer feedback? That appears to be a formula for brand death. It's a good thing Campbell was more intelligent than that.

Moderator:- Well, that’s interesting to know. I mean it’s intriguing to figure that a soup company used this marketing technique. So, were any research institutes or firms approached?

Harshitha:-Various teams were brought in at different stages to conduct different types of analysis, according to Matthew Tullman of Merchant Mechanics–one of three firms on board for the redesign campaign–and each interacted with the other to triangulate the data. Innerscope Research IncMerchant Mechanics and Olson Zaltman Associates were the three firms.

At the end of the 18 months, Merchant Mechanics was called in to correlate actual in-store consumer behavior with Innerscope's biometrics and the findings of the in-depth interviews. Tullman's team employed a mixture of in-store cameras, patented micro facial expression analysis, in-aisle eye-tracking and pupillometry, and intercept interviews." Companies that depend only on traditional metrics, focusing primarily at the conscious level, are missing a significant component of what drives buying behavior," says Dr. Carl Marci of Innerscope Research, Inc. The most substantial chunk of brain processing (75 to 95 percent) takes place without our knowledge. Because emotional responses are unconscious, awareness measurements such as surveys and focus groups make it nearly hard for people to understand what triggered them ultimately.

Many contend that a competent designer with good instincts might develop the new label design just as quickly. It's possible. After all, it's not a huge jump to realize that a steaming cup of soup is likely to provoke a favorable emotional reaction.

Moderator:- That’s really insightful to notice that 95 % brain processing happens without our interference.?So, what next steps were taken by Campbell?

Harshitha:-Campbell altered their containers to give potential customers a favorable impression when they saw them. The spoon was removed from the image, a vapor rising from the soup was added, and it changed the bowl's outlines. Experts claim that the appearance of steam conveyed a sense of warmth, which elicited an emotional response from customers. In addition, the renowned red-colored stripe at the top of Campbell's soup containers made it difficult for buyers to pick out their favorite taste, according to the study.

Moderator:- So did these new techniques bring any significant change in the way the company functioned?

Harshitha:- Compared to the same quarter the previous year, Campbell's soup sales in the United States fell 5%. Sales of its condensed soups in the United States declined by 1%. The company's senior executives admitted that the loss was primarily due to a lack of new goods in its soup line-up that might entice customers and nothing to do with soup packaging.

Mmmm, Was this a marketing gimmick disguised as science, designed to enthrall corporate clients rather than consumers? There are many questions, but as said by Jennifer Williams - a social media strategist in her blog. " Campbell's synchronization of a meticulous study conducted by three agencies–research that involved two years of data collection and statistical analysis–appears to be true science."

This was one of the best examples to understand what the company had done to redesign its package. Now once go to Google images and search Campbell packaging before and after Neuromarketing. Let me know which design you pick anyway, don't be sure because the conscious answer does not work in a real scenario, hahaha…..

Moderator: This was a real unique case, I must say . So apart from the Soup industry where else can we find the application of neuromarketing?

Harshitha:- Now we will talk about where else Neuromarketing can be applied. To discuss this, we need to understand another beautiful concept: decision paralysis. Ever since the dawn of the internet, decision paralysis has been a significant marketing difficulty. As a behavioral scientist, Duke University professor, TED speaker, and author Dan Ariely put it, we "don't know what we want very often."

Jonah Lehrer outlines an experiment in which two groups of people were asked to rank five types of strawberry jam that taste experts had already appraised in his book How We Decide. The jams were sampled and reviewed by one set of people. Surprisingly, this group ranked the jams in the same order as the pros - the correlation was 0.55, which isn't bad for many amateur chefs. In other words, untrained customers could distinguish between different jam quality just by following their taste sensations.

The second set of consumers was asked to score the jams, but they were asked to justify their decisions and examine their first thoughts. Instead of assisting the individuals, this extra mental process appeared to muddle their options. They couldn't tell which jams were the best, and their scores were only 0.11 higher than the experts'.

Let's take a look at a "purchasing" scenario that followed a similar trend. Subjects were given a selection of posters to choose from, which included Van Gogh and Monet reproductions and cat images. The subjects were given the option of taking their favorite posters home with them. The first group chose one of the fine art posters, and 95% of them did so. The second group was given the task of rating the posters and responding to a series of questions about why they liked some posters over others. Those who carried off a Van Gogh or Monet poster were virtually evenly split from those who selected cats.

Is there a better decision as a result of the additional reflection??The exact opposite happened. When the groups were polled several weeks after receiving their posters, 75% of those who chose a cat poster regretted their decision, whereas almost none of those who chose a fine arts image did. The emotional decision proved to be significantly superior to the "rational" decision.

This is to make you understand the concept of decision paralysis, and next, we can see how Neuromarketing has helped design campaigns to address this.

Moderator: Well, this was interesting. I see we have seven more types under Neuromarketing. Let's catch up with the rest in the upcoming episodes. Thank you.?