To what extent do you think neuromarketing can find out the consumer intent, desires and latent demand for a product?
Finding out what products, brands or marketing messages consumers will respond positively to or recall and act upon is a key part of market research and the rapidly expanding field of neuromarketing has a similar purpose. But in contrast to traditional explicit market methods that capture consumers explicit responses via, for example, focus groups or explicit surveys, neuromarketing tools are able to tap into customers’ subconscious responses and reveal deep-seated emotions and implicit biases that are not always accessible through introspection.
The reason why this is important is because often consumers do not know how they feel, or say what they think and neither do they do what they say. The result is that 80% or more of all new products fail within their first year to market and often despite millions of dollars spent on explicit market research. The ramifications for the industrial economy are massive and any tools which can help better predict what people will or will not buy must be beneficial to both companies and consumers.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve undertaken an extensive number of commercial market research projects using functional MRI scanners to literally “see inside” consumers’ brains as they are exposed to different marketing messages, across different platforms, at different times of the day; as well as to new product prototypes, new flavours, fragrances and even fabrics. The results of these studies have consistently shown that in many circumstances, people say one thing, but the brain tells a different story – and one which is more accurate at predicting how products will fare in the market. This is a significant gain over the typical market research methods.
The reason for this is that consumers often don’t know how they feel about new products, or brands which they have bought for many years and which have become part of their everyday purchasing habits. Other times, respondents want to provide positive feedback irrespective of what they really think, in order not to seem negative. Neuromarketing tools bypass these social biases and attempt to get at people’s true underlying desires and preferences.
In some researches related to neuromarketing, it has been observed that the researchers were able to find out even the confidential information like ATM pins, account passwords etcetera from the subjects using brain mapping. Do you think that frequent use of such technology can be unethical and can be an intrusion to an individual’s privacy?
Any new technology may be open to abuse. It is up to humans how do they use it. However, the recently established Neuromarketing Science and Business Association (NMSBA), an organisation that represents the neuromarketing industry, has made the publication of a Code of Ethics one of its primary activities. The NMSBA Code of Ethics was published at the end of 2012 and it is a requirement of membership that all neuromarketing practitioners abide by this code. Key components of this include assurance of experimental transparency, subject confidentiality and respect for individuals’ privacy. In practice, neuromarketing studies aim to find out not how a single individual responds but how groups of consumers’ brains react to a new or existing product or service. This is partly because knowing what a single individual believes is not particularly useful to companies marketing to large populations and also because neuromarketing methods typically require (as with any other market research) a sufficient number of individuals’ data to ensure statistically significant results.
Do you think that neuromarketing can become a replacement of market research and human judgment, when it comes to finding out consumer needs and desire patterns? I do not believe that any neuromarketing practitioner honestly believes that solely capturing consumers’ subconscious responses is ever going to tell the whole story about what may work and what may not, any more than relying only on people’s explicit feedback can do. Neuroscience has made rapid progress over the past few decades at finding out more about how we make decisions, what influences our thinking, what the role of emotions are in determining how we behave.
The consensus that is emerging is that while complex choices and behaviours are often driven initially by subconscious emotional brain processes, these can also be substantially modulated by the conscious brain which allows us to eschew short term gains in order to achieve longer term goals. So human decision-making is the outcome of both implicit and explicit brain processes – only by being able to measure both will marketers be able to gain at 360 degree perspective on what lies behind our behaviour.
In times when subjects such as stem cell research, cloning et. al. have not been able to get a go-ahead in many countries, do you think that neuromarketing practices can get through legal and political hurdles?
In contrast to areas such as stem cell research and cloning, neuromarketing per se does not set out to alter the human condition, but to better understand it. Naturally, appropriate regulation to protect respondents’ well-being, privacy and to ensure transparency at all stages is a prerequisite if the industry is to survive and benefit consumers. Good market research is about finding out what the consumers need and want so providers can deliver products and services which match these desires and needs; neuromarketing can greatly help to achieve this, which benefits all of us.
But the important point is that no matter what neuroscientists learn about the brain, or how we make decisions, or how our choices are influenced by certain cues, at the end of the day, if the product purchased does not deliver on expectations or generate an experience that is superior to what has already gone before, then our brains will ultimately reject it. In this way, our brains act as gatekeepers of marketing practices.
Apart from the sci-fi loaded brain mapping techniques, what conventional ways have marketers been using to find out consumer demands? How accurate have these ways proved for them?
Focus group, surveys and questionnaires online have all proved useful at being able to extract a partial picture of how consumers think – at least some of the time. On the other hand, neuromarketing has typically used brain scanners, eye trackers and electrodes to monitor consumers’ implicit brain responses to the same questions or concepts. The former approach suffers to some extent from the fact that it only captures the tip of the iceberg of consumers thoughts and feelings, most of which occur below the level of conscious awareness, and therefore, often fail to predict behaviour. Traditional neuromarketing on the other hand has been criticised for requiring the use of costly brain scanners or unwieldy electrode caps which have negative implications in terms of practicality and scalability.
A recent hybrid approach, which we believe allows marketers to benefit from the best of both approaches, is the evolution of online neuromarketing techniques. These methods, which have been developed and validated after years of piloting and commercial testing alongside brain scanning methods, have now reached the level of sophistication required to be able to capture people’s subconscious responses online and with considerable speed without the need for scanners and electrodes. These methods rely on measuring people’s response times at timescales (milliseconds) too fast for the conscious brain to kick in and influence the subconscious (or “gut instinct”) reaction.
The approach involves presenting words (eg. brand attributes, logos, slogans) and/or images (products, celebrity endorsers, new prototypes) on a computer screen (or tablet, or mobile phone) and requires respondents to react in less than a second. The outcomes of these mini-tests provide insight into consumers’ implicit biases and preferences across a huge range of marketing stimuli. We therefore believe that, far from the sci-fi loaded brain mapping, the future of neuromarketing lies in the integration of these easily implementable, cost-effective and scalable online neuromarketing tools with traditional qualitative and quantitative market research methods.
