"Next Generation Marketing" review

Recently I enrolled for a Mini-degree in Digital Psychology and Persuasion from CXL Institute. I would love to share whatever I will learn from this Mini-degree through a series of articles.

This is my first "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" review article in a series of a total of 12 articles. I will be posting an article for consecutive 12 upcoming Fridays in which I will cover all the tactics and principles of Neuro-Marketing and Digital psychology and Persuasion which will surely help anyone passionate about Neuro-Marketing.

Marketing when integrated with Psychology results in a very high conversion rate and customer acquisition is literally skyrocketed. Psychology is a broad and diverse field that encompasses the study of human thought, behavior, development, personality, emotion, motivation, and more.

What is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing methods go far beyond traditional collection techniques by tracing the biological, physiological, and neurological changes that arise in our brains in response to marketing stimuli.

You may not realize this, but anytime you answer a survey, it requires an enormous amount of your precious brain energy. Getting paid to participate in surveys does not even reduce this burden! Cognitive energy is priceless. Using brain-based methods means we no longer depend on the conscious and active participation of subjects. We are not asking them to behave like zombies but, simply, to relax and let the messages work on their brains. There is no need for the subjects to verbalize anything either. The point is to allow the exposure to a stimulus to work on their neurophysiology.

Attention recruits brain energy to allow your audience to focus on your message and process its content. A lot of that attention is managed below our level of awareness. Therefore, attention is difficult to measure when you ask your audience to describe how much they focused on your message. Consciousness, our ability to observe and report our immediate experience, is both slow and fragile. Your messages are narrative constructions that affect your audience at a much greater speed than consciousness allows. Consequently, we are incompetent at describing the quality of our immediate attention. Instead, collecting brain data is rather easy because it does not rely on a subject's ability to report. More importantly, it helps measure attention on a millisecond basis, which is a game-changer for how you can explain the effect of any marketing stimulus. Stories produce various cycles of attention during which your audience is engaged, moved, or bored, the timeline of which can be captured by different neuromarketing techniques such as reading the conductivity of the skin, decoding facial expressions, tracking eye movements, or monitoring brain waves. A story works in amazing ways. Most of its effect is not accessible to our awareness. Neuromarketing methods are designed to show whether a message has captured any form of attention, conscious or subconscious, automatic or intentional, which makes an enormous difference in your ability to create successful messages.

Research data shows that we choose to share what makes us feel good and hide what lowers our self-esteem. The younger we are, the more unreliable our statements tend to be. Fortunately, neuromarketing studies do not depend on what people say, but how their brains respond. When we conduct one, we look at how the participants' neurons fire at millisecond intervals, and what they feel, measured by their brain's response to external stimuli.

The neurons in the brain respond in a fraction of a second, triggering emotional responses before the conscious mind even processes the information. Therefore, a subject may have a subconscious reaction, but once it becomes conscious, he may not feel comfortable sharing it with a researcher. Perhaps he may not feel it is appropriate or wants to be perceived favorably by the researcher. Either way, in psychology, this is referred to as the social desirability bias. Furthermore, even if the subject believes that he is reporting true feelings in response to an advertisement, the brain data may show otherwise. Neuromarketing findings help identify the distance, if not the distortions, between what people say they feel and how they truly feel while measuring the influence of our emotions on our behavior.

Which Emotions Trigger Decisions?

We experience thousands of emotions. Therefore, it is impossible to report specific emotions because they flicker, and even when they reach our consciousness, our perception is too slow and not discriminate enough to sort and label each feeling. However, some tools like facial decoding software give us the ability to reveal universal emotional expressions like happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, contempt, and disgust, which are mostly triggered below people's level of awareness. Tiny movements created by our facial muscles produce micro-expressions that appear for less than 35 milliseconds.

 Interestingly, only self-reported negative emotions like disgust or anger tend to correlate with brain data. Negative emotions are felt in our guts and do not require the filter and bias of our cognitive interpretation. Meanwhile, linking emotions and behavior is tricky. Understanding this critical connection requires that both emotions and behavior be defined and measured properly. Unfortunately, emotions are abstract concepts. There is not a tool ready-made to measure all emotions. For instance, there is no such thing as “an anger thermometer,” so to assess anger via a questionnaire, psychologists need to develop a special scale. It is very difficult to do because once you start proposing a scale of a psychological construct, people have differing opinions about what the construct means. 

Fortunately, neuromarketing studies do not depend on scales or the subjective interpretation of psychological states but, rather, on known and accepted neurophysiological metrics. Think of how we measure the weight of objects today. People do not argue about the definitions of what is light or heavy. We use standards that have been accepted and used for hundreds of years. Such standards do not exist in traditional marketing research to measure mental states like attention, boredom, engagement, comprehension, memorization, and, of course, persuasion. Surveys are entirely dependent on the subjective interpretation people have about the questions. Are you excited about this ad? Are you bored? These are questions that assume all people will understand the same way, leaving no room for the subjective interpretation of a given emotional state. On the other hand, neuromarketing studies scientifically measure emotional states and remove the error provided by the subjective nature of our language and the limiting processing capacity of our consciousness.

Congrats! You are now one step ahead in the competition after understanding Neuro-Marketing.

Stay tuned for next Friday!

  (This article is a review for the mini degree, "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" from CXL institute".)

Thanks :-)

Gaurav Panwar