Nowadays advertisers use cutting-edge techniques to discover what the best way is to influence their customers. One of the upcoming techniques is called: neuromarketing. Neuromarketing can be expressed as using neuroscience / knowledge of the functioning of the human brain in your marketing. The science of how a purchase decision is made in the human brain plays an important role in this. In this blog we will look at how marketeers can influence your brain more than you think and whether that entails dangers or not.
For neuromarketing, subjects are placed under an MRI scanner and while videos or photos are shown their brain activity is being read. Particular attention is paid to the parts in the brain that are responsible for positive emotions, such as passion, desire, and motivation. The reason for this is because those parts play an important role in the purchase decision. Information from those studies provides answers to many marketing issues.
In most cases neuromarketing is used for advertising optimization, price optimization, or branding. With as main goal: to influence your purchase decision. However, it's not like people have full access to your brain and decisions. Think of it more as marketeers adjusting all parts of a product in such a way that your brain is more likely to buy the product.
One way that neuromarketing is used is on web shops, here they use a Call To Action (or CTA for short). A CTA is used to persuade the consumer (so you) into purchasing. One example of this is to make sure that the button for ‘buy now’ is visible and easily noticed which a lot of retailers use nowadays. However, you might have spotted on some websites phrases such as ‘only 10 items left’ of ‘buy before midnight to use this promotion’. These phrases alarm the fear of losing something (in this case the item itself or the promotion) and makes you want to purchase is more and right now.
In short, it can be concluded that neuromarketing is still in its infancy and that there may be more possibilities with neuromarketing in the future. However, at the moment it is a very effective way of influencing customers and therefore it is a phenomenon that needs to be closely monitored. And a final tip: be aware that marketers can just press your "buy button" at any moment.