“What comes out of our mouths is not always a perfect rendition of what’s going on in our brains” – Platt. I wrote about my ideas on ‘Neuromarketing’ in my previous piece. Surprisingly, when diving deep into the ocean, I learned more about the various tactics that could be used in the future.

Neuromarketing is a combination of neuroscience and marketing strategies that aim to extract as many accurate insights as possible from the human brain and body to convert those insights into sales predictions. This perfect blend is currently in the process of evolution, and researchers are doing everything they can to achieve perfection from it. As I previously stated, the biggest issue uncovered in traditional marketing research is the consumers’ bias. Their actions, words, and thoughts are not all in a straight line. As a result, neuromarketing can be a magical wand for marketers to investigate the perceptive relationship between what they think, do, and say. Let us take a look at some of the ways that marketers and researchers can utilize in the future to achieve the same goal:

NeuroMarketing – The possible techniques:

1. Eye-Tracking: It is a technique that monitors the eye movements of a person being examined, as the name suggests. When a person sees a product, brand, or advertisement, how do their eyes move and try to extract information connected to various human emotions such as his like, dislike, delight, curiosity, persuasion, and so on? With neuromarketing, marketers can acquire a precise response from their target consumers once the product, brand, or campaign hits the market. These devices are extremely pleasant to wear, and respondents may use them while shopping. Numerous pieces of important information can be extracted, such as the amount of attention paid and the content read when encountering a billboard, or when choosing a product among many, or about shelf placement, and so on.
2. Pupilometry: “Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal” – Samuel Richardson. The human eyes, as one of the most important sense organs, perform a critical role in giving significant information when the mouth is silent. Because our eyes dilate when we view something we like, marketers can acquire reliable information about what the consumer likes or does not like. Pupilometry is one of the most prevalent and inexpensive devices to determine if respondents’ eyes dilated or not after witnessing a product, brand, or ad campaign.
3. EEG: The functioning of the human brain is highly complicated. It is critical to monitor brain activity to gain insight into future buying decisions made by end-users. This is because advances in neuroscience have made it possible to read the brain’s electromagnetic activities using electroencephalograms (EEG). Marketers may now acquire more precise information about consumers’ tastes and preferences when it comes to products and services, branding and campaigns, labeling and packaging, and so on.
4. fMRI: The other technology for precisely reading the mind’s actions is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. Reading the continuous reactions inside the brain after seeing a product, brand, or campaign, for example, is a special way to understand cause-and-effect relationships. Unlike EEG, fMRI provided information with a lower sensitivity to the timing of any particular event. Surprisingly, this strategy exposed the brain area responsible for a specific response from the given event.
5. Face Reading: After the eyes and the brain, facial expressions play an essential role in relaying information about a person’s moods, likes and dislikes, perceptions, ideas, and future plans. We smile, display displeasure, disgust, amazement, or even confusion, and with all this, provide marketers with a pool of information about our responses and reactions. It will assist them in comprehending the behavior of their target market in the long run.
6. Sensory Marketing: As the name implies, it is a marketing method that entails developing content that appeals to all of your target audience’s sense organs while conveying the message. To induce sensory stimulations, marketers or brands delve deeply into an emotional association to establish a strong connection with their customers. Smell and sound (for example, coffee and perfumes) have incredible appeal when it comes to attracting customers to specific products or companies.
7. Neuromarketing Tricks: These are strategies that have been proven through study and trials to help marketers figure out what to sell and how to sell it. For example, it was discovered that they had a higher-order number when healthy food items are mentioned on the left side of a restaurant menu. Marketers can also play with customers’ minds by removing the dollar symbol ($) from the price tag and only using Indian money. They will be able to gain greater approval from the purchasers if they do so. Using prices like as 49 instead of 50, 99 instead of 100, 299 instead of 300, and so on is a common physiological marketing strategy to make customers believe they are spending less. The buyer will feel more relaxed as a result of this.

The tactics mentioned above are just a handful of the many that can be used in Neuromarketing campaigns. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be many more, and researchers, academics, and practitioners must collaborate on additional exploratory investigations. Before proceeding, it is critical to have correct information on any harmful impact that using such techniques, notably, EEG and fMRI, may have on the subject’s brain functioning. Furthermore, we must discover the correct answers as to how a person’s current health and function responds to a marketer’s neuromarketing actions.

Happy Reading!
Dr. Anuradha Yadav
Assistant Professor
DSCE-MBA