Neuromarketing in Action

How to Talk and Sell to the Brain

Patrick M Georges, Anne-Sophie Bayle-Tourtoulou, Michel Badoc

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780749469283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Retail Industry
• Index: Business

Neuromarketing in Action provides an in-depth review of how the brain functions and the ways in which it unconsciously influences consumer behaviour. It shows both the scientific frameworks and the practical applications of this increasingly popular marketing tool. Referencing many global brands such as Aston Martin, Hermes, Virgin, Facebook, Ralph Lauren and Fuji, the authors, whose background covers both neuroscience and marketing, showcase the latest thinking on brain function and intelligence, and on the subconscious influences on consumer behaviour.
Neuromarketing in Action then examines the ways in which marketing efficiency can be improved through the satisfaction of the customer's senses, emotions, memory and conscience and looks at the impact on current marketing activities such as selling methods, sensory marketing and product modification, and on future strategies like value innovation, sensory brands, increased interaction with social networks and permission marketing.

PART I

Neuromarketing or the art of selling to the brain

As a science studying how to bring companies closer to their customers, marketing has numerous limitations in terms of studies as well as business approach, sales and communication. By drawing on neuroscience, which helps probe human intelligence and comprehends the unconscious of the brain, it significantly improves its efficacy with all its interlocutors: managers, employees, partners and, of course, customers.

This new approach constitutes the Neuromarketing domain. It was born out of the technical possibilities, inspired by the medical sector, of analysing how the brain works and their applications to marketing. Studies in neuromedicine largely rely on the possibility of lighting up the lobes of the brain associated with decision making and action. They were identified by a wealth of medical research relating to epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of brain injury. Studies also draw on the analysis of hormone secretion and its impact on human behaviour. For instance when dopamine is largely secreted, it provides pleasure and makes the desire to buy products greater. Neuromarketing studies help in understanding how the brain responds to different stimuli and making decisions.

The use of neuroscience in the marketing approach, because of its efficiency, is not without danger. It can be used properly only by marketers with sound ethics and irreproachable professional conduct.

01

Marketing and its limitations in understanding human intelligence

Marketing represents an analytical tool, a state of mind, an approach, and technical expertise. As with a sporting event that one watches while comfortably seated in the stadium or in front of the television, its practice may, at first glance, seem simple, if not simplistic. This is a misleading illusion. Success is the result of patented professionalism as well as serious predispositions. Like high-level athletes, marketing professionals achieve success by learning good technical approaches and by developing their practice. The speed of performance linked to the switch from amateurism to professionalism largely depends on the acquisition of good marketing gestures. To acquire these gestures, marketing professionals must hone their skills in this discipline, and master the methods and tools, while being aware of their limitations. Neuroscience can enable them to push back these limitations to improve their efficiency. Its contribution to the marketing discipline leads to the emergence of a new discipline: Neuromarketing.

The concepts of marketing and Neuromarketing

Marketing to acquire a sense of the customer

The influence of marketing requires acknowledging that manufacturing products or services are no longer ends in themselves but means to the end of satisfying customer needs. This new form of relationship with customers leads to a radical change of attitude.

From a marketing perspective, the consumer’s tastes and needs prevail over those of the technicians. Customer needs are becoming the number one source of inspiration in the development of products and services.

While marketing is above all a state of mind designed to resolutely focus all company resources on customer satisfaction, the company must not realize this desire to the detriment of its own best interests, in particular the two critical imperatives, ie profitability and maintaining or improving its image. This is why we limit ourselves to defining marketing as:

THE ART OF SATISFYING ONE’S CUSTOMERS WHILE MAKING THE BOSS HAPPY (profitability–quality–image)

or

THE ART OF CREATING VALUE BOTH FOR THE CUSTOMERS AND FOR THE COMPANY

The obligation to adapt to the consumers’ tastes, needs and expectations is even more crucial when the company performs its activities in an economic environment where the offer is greater than the demand, an environment often referred to as a ‘market economy’.

Increasing competition gives consumers a greater choice and makes them more demanding. It is sometimes said that the customer is king. The development of new information and communication technologies (NICTs) based on the internet only accentuates this trend. Possible choices and information prior to a purchase have increased exponentially. The opportunities are such that consumers can even switch from the status of king to that of dictator. With the internet, they are no longer satisfied with one-way information and communication. They want to ask questions and share their views. They switch progressively from the status of consumer to that of proactive consumer. They are guided by conscious as well as subconscious expectations, emanating from their brain’s responses to different stimuli. Thorough knowledge of neuroscience helps marketing professionals comprehend the subconscious motives that help consumers decide and act. The integration of the two disciplines opens the paths of Neuromarketing.

The Neuromarketing space

The role of marketing is not to decide but to provide insight for managers and operational staff so that they can make the right decisions. It must act as a spotlight for decision makers, who often have to make do with a torch to guide their decision. The benefit of neuroscience is that, by adapting this light to how the brain works, it helps transform lighting into conviction.

The art of marketing is to give decision makers in headquarters and in the field a better understanding of their environment in order to make the right choices. It consists of finding space to enable the creation of value for both the customer and the company. Neuromarketing integrates the study of conscious and subconscious motivations, which can lead to a decision, into this space (see Figure 1.1). Motivations are apparent in customers as well as business decision makers. To succeed, Neuromarketing must be capable of convincing customers, so that they buy, and decision makers, so that they agree to give marketing the budget and resources necessary to please, convince and attract customers.

FIGURE 1.1 The Neuromarketing space

Internal decision makers must be convinced first. Without their support, the marketer will not have the means required to win over the customer. Moreover, the marketing function must often teach the internal organization how to be customer-centric and approach the customer in the best possible conditions.

The approach that makes it possible to find this space is difficult to implement, as it requires confronting these two partners with conflicting and sometimes contradictory requirements. To achieve this, genuine professionalism based on a rigorous approach is crucial.

To be effective, professionalism relies on a body of knowledge derived from marketing and neuroscience that sheds light on the conscious and subconscious modes of action of customers and internal decision makers.

Evolution within the Neuromarketing space calls for both modesty and scientific rigour. It helps ensure that managers do not extrapolate their subjectivity to the entire market. They begin to adopt a marketing attitude when they no longer consider themselves a representative sample of their customer base, regardless of their experience. Marketing professionals focus on listening to the customer rather than holding preconceived or subjective ideas. Thorough knowledge of how the brain comprehends and processes the information received from the environment helps them improve their objectivity.

Rigorous and methodical marketing practitioners must also have a salesperson’s temperament. They must be able to listen and understand their interlocutors and make themselves understood by adapting the way they think and speak to their interlocutors’ communication patterns. This is true in particular when they have to work with engineers, financial personnel and IT people. The use of neuroscience will help them realize what can instinctively guide these partners in their reactions.

Neuroscience provides an interesting contribution, as it gives additional insight, sometimes different from declarations. This knowledge helps distinguish between the interlocutors’ deep thoughts and conventional attitude or even doublespeak. It sheds light on the brain’s stimuli that trigger, often subconsciously, the positive or negative reactions of internal partners and customers to the decision.

Marketing limitations and the contribution of neuroscience: the path of Neuromarketing

The marketing issue can be illustrated by the humorous albeit pertinent cartoon presented in Figure 1.2. The role of the marketing director or marketing staff (product, market, brand managers) is to implement a policy designed to remove both ‘?’s: that of the elephant, which symbolizes the customer, and that of the employee.

FIGURE 1.2 Marketing issue

SOURCE: McDonald and Morris (1992).

Remove the elephant’s ‘?’

To do this, the primary role of the marketing function is to provide the company with insight into what customers expect from their suppliers: knowing what goes through their mind, and their tastes, needs and expectations. This is necessary to avoid any errors when designing the different elements of the ‘marketing mix’, for example development and presentation of the product or service, pricing, sale, distribution, communication and after-sale. The marketing function must, in this respect, be a guiding light providing further, broader, more detailed insight into what customers think. Most of the time, managers have at first only a narrow view of these needs, largely conditioned by their preconceived ideas. They then have a battery of quantitative and qualitative consumer studies at their disposal.

Unfortunately, these studies have numerous limitations. Based on statements, they reflect only what the customers say, which is not necessarily what they think. For difficult topics such as politics, racism, sexuality or other delicate subjects, customers sometimes conceal their actual thoughts for fear of offending their interlocutor or being criticized for having ideas that do not conform with the common view. In other cases, they are incapable of comprehending certain key elements that influence their purchase, for example the colours of a yogurt pot, the shape of the packaging, or the label. These oversights, which may seem insignificant to professionals, sometimes lead the marketing function to make errors in the assessment of most marketing mix elements. In this context, thorough knowledge of how the brain reacts to the different stimuli in its environment can provide an additional vision, making it possible to adapt the companies’ offers and propositions to the consumers’ actual, unexpressed expectations. The evaluation of instinctive behavioural reactions improves the explanation of certain purchasing trends that may seem irrational in the customers’ decision-making process. The use of neuroscience as part of Neuromarketing helps complete the results from traditional studies and provide marketers with a more in-depth vision of the needs felt by customers.

Looking into what happens in the brain significantly improves the marketing knowledge relating to the consumer’s behaviour, purchasing processes and communication perception. The pertinence of Neuromarketing studies is particularly obvious when researchers focus on the emotion triggered in customers, their recall, their positive or negative desires, and their predispositions to purchase.

Remove the employee’s ‘?’

While it provides insight, marketing is seldom a source of decisions. While its role is to guide the different decision makers on what customers expect and what they do or do not like, its role is rarely to decide on their behalf, unless the marketing director is also the company’s CEO or managing director, which is often the case in small and medium-sized enterprises but not in large corporations.

To gain support for a shared market vision, the marketing manager needs to convince. This need to convince is all the more important as the customer’s expectations often relate to perception more than reality or rationality. In a world where employees are rational (engineer...