Insights From Neuroscience Can Improve Our Marketing

Top Neuromarketing Appetizers.

Spending money can be painful. Brain scans of people buying experimental stuff with experimental money, shows physical pain centers being activated by perceptions of poor value items. Price is a big part of this of course, but perception is even bigger.

Bundling lots of product features under one big price tag is a good way to prevent customers ‘flinching’. Car option packages are a good example of this. They avoid lots of separate ‘pain points’ for the leather seats, the ‘infotainment’, the electric windows, etc.

It’s not just the price either! Perceived unfairness in a purchase can cause pain too. You need to review your whole marketing offers from the point of view of your target customer and eliminate the pain points.

If your prices are higher than your competitors’ prices, it is vital that you explain to your customers exactly how you give them better value.

‘Priming’ can give you a competitive advantage. Giving people subtle psychological leads, can guide their buying decisions your way. For example, images of cash money increases self-centered behavior, and telegraphing big numbers in a negotiation can ease the acceptance of a relatively higher bid.

Video->>> Our daily behavior is irrational. We are influenced by all kinds of invisible forces.

How’s this for an intriguing bit of psychology? Prof. Dan Ariely at Duke University, primed subjects with random numbers – the last 2 digits of their own social security numbers – . He then asked each of them how much they would pay for a wifi keyboard. The higher the priming number, the more they were willing to pay!

 

Are your prices ‘anchored’ or flexible? How much do you know about your customer’s price expectations when they browse your wares?

 

Get in Touch With Customer’s of Good Taste.

There is a superfast hyperlink between our 5 senses – vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell – and the buying/decision-making areas of our brains. When you build in sensory features to your products and promotions, you are appealing directly to the subconscious emotions and memories of your customers.

• …Vision: Do you have consistent and appealing packaging, logos, promotions, use of color, and appropriate fonts? You all know the power of the word ‘FREE’ but is it better to say free, free or free? Depends on what you’re selling. The pen is mightier than the sword and copywriting is an art form.

 

• …Hearing: Are your product sounds and ad music doing you any favors at all? Mood music can create bad moods too.

• …Touch: How do your customers feel about your product’s skin and shape? Do your marketing materials and environmental surfaces keep you in touch with customers? Hard chairs during negotiations make for hard bargains.

 

• …Taste: Does your marketing taste good? Can you make connections by using edible favors? Hot coffee is so much better than a cold beverage by conveying a warm and comfortable feeling!

 

• …Smell: How does your ‘store’ environment smell? Does your product aroma trigger good memories or does it get up the nose of customers?

 

As consumers, we all have split personalities, the ‘want’ side and the ‘should’ side. As in we want the side order of fries. But we also know we should take the fresh vegetable salad. Are your products want or should? Impulse buys (wants) or later consumption items (should)?

A Carnegie Mellon survey of 13,000 consumers allocated them to one of three groups according to their willingness to part with cash. 24% of your customers are ‘tightwads’. 15% are ‘spendthrifts’, while the majority are ‘unconflicted’. There are things you can do to make your marketing reach even the “tightwads”.

I am recommending to all my clients that they get into neuromarketing. Roger Dooley’s ‘Brainfluence’ is a good starting point. Wealth and job creation is only possible when you stay ahead of the competition. The lessons of neuroscience and the Internet together are redefining marketing as we have known it. Don’t get left behind.