24 ADVISOR: Marketing
Beware of sharp objects! While the transaction as the sharp endpoint of business is usually the key focus for neuromarketing, it’s important that we continue to gain a better understanding of how consumers behave and react, writes Colin Gordon
COLIN GORDON
marketing expert
M
arketing as a function within an organisation could be said to have been around formally for approximately 80 years with the introduction of the ‘marketing mix’ to the business community in the early 1940s. Since then, there have been many new elements introduced into the general topic of marketing, but I would argue that the fundamentals have not changed nor did they need to change it’s still all about finding and retaining consumers; it’s all about the transaction. Some of these additions are essentially operational (e.g., direct mail), some more core to the essence of how business operates. One particular development however is worth some attention: neuromarketing. Certainly, the whole topic of neuroscience and consumer psychology – and their merging into neuromarketing – has become a considerable focus across a range of geographies, institutes and specialisms within marketing.
Relatively unknown Even though it’s nearly 20 years old, neuromarketing is still relatively unknown. It aims to understand how the brain - and by some assumed extension, the consumer - reacts to certain marketing stimuli. It’s the ‘science of consumer decisions’; trying to understand the whys and the motivations and then to influence both. MRI scanners, EEG machines, eye trackers, motion recorders, advertising test software, AI and big data are involved. Neuromarketing is,
Neuromarketing is, in essence, trying to develop the ‘total understanding of the consumer’, combining behavioural science and psychology with other more recognised forms of market research, writes Colin Gordon
in essence, trying to develop the ‘total understanding of the consumer’, combining behavioural science and psychology with other more recognised forms of market research. Various branding stimuli such as price, but more obviously and more regularly brand identity (mostly by way of advertising and packaging), are used to gauge the strength of response by the brain to knowing (or being told) the identity of certain brands or alterations to components of the brand personality versus what the consumer might have thought was the situation. This can also reveal what elements should be dialled up or down in the process of product development. The highly regarded and influential business publication Harvard Business
A boss of mine once gave me advice when we were discussing a particular operational strategy to do with ‘route to market’ options. “Don’t forget,” he advised (or directed!), “you’ll pick a particular choice now but in some years’ time you’ll go back to where you are today. There’s little new in business and even then, things go in circles, always coming back, even if in a disguised or renamed form.” ShelfLife December 2021 | www.shelflife.ie
Review has written a detailed paper on the subject (see Eben Harrell, 23 January 2019) and Roger Dooley is a good example of a real evangelist on the whole area (see his website neurosciencemarketing.com) so it’s getting a fair amount of serious attention. It has even been picked up locally with irishtechnews.ie (12 March 2019) bringing it all back home (so to speak). The growth in social media and the vast amount of data resulting from this, has opened up a whole area of predictive behaviours with the much talked about ‘algorithms’ at the centre of the attention. So much so, that it would be easy to conflate neuromarketing with algorithm management.
Little new in business But let’s back up a little. A boss of mine once gave me advice when we were discussing a particular operational strategy to do with ‘route to market’ options. “Don’t forget,” he advised (or directed!), “you’ll pick a particular choice now but in some years’ time, you’ll go back to where you are today. There’s little new in business and even then, things go in
