Neuroscience and Neuromarketing

Marketing is anything an organisation does which is related with communicating and selling of a product or a service to an audience. “To acquire customers, satisfy and maintain a relationship with them and subsequently to generate profits for the company.” For that to be achieved, extensive research has to be carried out to target markets.

Since the second half 20th century, technology has enabled marketers to have improved and more accurate ideas on how not only to measure its product or service’s success but to research into what is the most effective way to create a long lasting image, which can compel consumers to buy. For decades, marketers have heavily relied on traditional methods of research – surveys, experiments and focus groups. The results, even though it had discrepancies, were widely used to measure what consumers want and need, and to map out their attitudes. One of the issues found with the traditional methods was the belief that emotions were rarely detected by conventional research, and that has a deep influence on individual choices (McDowell and Dick, 2013). Making it clear that conventional research had to be combined with other tools to have a better understanding on how products, brands and services cause an impact in the consumers mind penetrating memories, emotions and positive experiences and transforming into customer loyalty.

Neuroscience is the study of the brain and the nervous system and how its functions can influence in human behaviour and cognitive functions. Among its several areas of study, neuroimaging - a branch of medical imaging that concentrates on how the brain works, and how different activities affect it (Nordqvist, 2012). It is a field of science that fundamentally, captures what happe...

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...cial skills and intuition and it highly influences in human’s rational mind. The old brain – located at the lower part of the brain - is the structure that humans commonly share with reptiles and it is where instinct is developed. This brain area is 450 million years old, therefore does not understand any language or words (Watson, 2012).

There are only six stimuli that can arouse the old brain: self-centred, emotion, visual, contrast, beginning and end of things and tangibility (Renvoise, Morin, 2007). Marketers believe that if any one or more of those stimuli are provoked in a marketing campaign, chances are it will be a successful one. According to Buy.ology writer, Martin Lindstorm, 85% of decisions consumers make, such as choosing the brand of washing up powder, are subconsciously made so marketers have stimulate consumers’ unconscious mind achieve their goal.