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What is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is an approach to understanding consumer behavior through the subconscious mind by measuring consumer responses to product design and marketing campaigns. It is also known as 'consumer neuro science' and aims to make marketing more effective.

Its beauty lies in bypassing the more traditional methods and marketing strategies of advertising campaigns taught in business school that relied on focus groups and consumer surveys to determine their efficacy.

Neuromarketing employs brain scans to measure brain activity in response to advertising campaigns or digital experiences, the most common being EEG and fMRI. An EEG (electroencephalogram or electroencephalography as it it is also known) uses electrodes (small metal discs) attached to people's brains to track neural signals.

FMRI stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and this neuroscience research technique measures our conscious and unconscious emotions and responses to advertising campaigns using an fMRI scan performed by an fMRI machine. It does this by tracking brain activity in deep parts of our brain in great detail, parts that we are just beginning to know what they are used for. 

An obvious example that speaks to the efficacy of neuromarketing methods is the use of the color red by Coca-Cola in its logo. Impulse control in the human brain happens in the prefrontal cortex, and neuroscience proves that observing the color red significantly stimulates appetite. All that prefrontal cortex activity made it a no-brainer (no pun intended) for Coca-Cola to splash out on red with their packaging when branding their sugary, black drink.

Gone are the days of test subjects sitting in a focus group, attempting to tell marketers with clipboards behind glass windows precisely what they do or don't like about a particular product.

With Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), eye tracking (which also measures pupil dilation), and facial coding, we can use neuromarketing to measure emotional responses to marketing stimuli without consumers putting their responses into clumsy words.

The brain and subconscious mind provide hard data that intelligence companies trust in assessing consumer behavior and trying to better understand how to utilize accurate market research to deliver better products, services, and, indeed, authentic web content.