This is the first in a series of articles dedicated to giving researchers a quick overview of current or newsworthy industry trends and practices. We’ll keep things brief - our goal is to touch on some of the main talking points surrounding a topic in about 1,000 words.
Just what do people mean when they talk about neuromarketing research?
It’s the use of an alphabet soup of techniques and technologies - EEG, QEEG, SST, fMRI, etc., plus facial coding and other biometrics - to measure consumers’ physiological responses to stimuli. In the case of marketers, the stimuli are usually things like advertisements, Web pages, product packages and TV shows.
EEG/QEEG/SST: Electroencephalography, quantified electroencephalography and steady-state topography all involve the recording and analysis of the brain’s electrical activity.
fMRI: Functional magnetic resonance imaging measures the changes in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain.
Facial coding: As the name suggests, facial coding measures facial muscle activity and typically uses a classification approach such as the Facial Coding Action System to gauge a respondent’s emotional response to stimuli.
What about stuff like eye-tracking?
Many of the new crop of neuromarketing measurements incorporate “old” technologies like eye-tracking, heart-rate monitoring and galvanic skin response, which have been around for quite a long time (at least in technological terms), so what’s old is new again.
Why neuromarketing research? Why now?
From a business perspective, most likely it has to do with the technology for some of the techniques becoming inexpensive enough to allow several vendors to enter the market with competing products.
From a marketing and research perspective, it seems like a natural response to the belief that traditional or non-biometric types of marketing research are incapable of or ill-suited to capturing consumers’ unconscious motivations. Human beings don’t understand their true motivations, this line of thinking goes, and therefore asking them directly (or even indirectly) about why they like an ad or why they buy one brand of shampoo is, at best, misleading and, at worst, pointless. Better to hook them up to some measuring devices, show them some stimuli and analyze their brainwaves or gaze path or pupil dilation.
And, with all the talk of engaging consumers on emotional levels these days, being able to peer into their innermost reactions holds a strong appeal for certain marketers.
Who’s using these techniques?
You name it. In terms of categories: retail; household and personal care products; food and beverage; entertainment; government/political; pharmaceuticals, telecommunications; publishing; financial services. In terms of companies: Microsoft, PayPal, Google, CBS, Disney, Frito-Lay, A&E Television, Cisco, The Weather Channel and Citi.
Some of the corporate sponsors of the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) NeuroStandards Collaboration Project include: Campbell Soup Company, Colgate-Palmolive, MillerCoors, GM, Dentsu, American Express, Hershey’s, Chase, Clorox, Warner Bros. Entertainment and Starcom.
What are they doing with them?
Testing packaging, in-store displays, advertising (print, Web, TV), TV shows, political campaigns and messages (TV, direct mail) and speeches for senate, congressional and gubernatorial candidates.
Does it work?
In the right situations, the answer appears to be yes.
What is the industry’s take on it?
The ARF’s NeuroStandards Collaboration Project released its first output at the Re:think event in March (see article ID 20110509 for related information). While no grand pronouncements were made and the panel, perhaps unsurprisingly, deemed that more study is needed, Horst Stipp, executive vice president, global business strategy at the ARF had this to say in a press release: “Neuromarketing, when done properly, is extremely valuable in providing learning regarding consumer attention and involvement and emotional reactions, But, the application of this complex science to marketing is still developing and there are a number of questions and concerns that surround the field.”
What are some of the pros of neuromarketing research?
As its heavy (and repeat) use by political campaigns attests, it seems to work well as a way to find the images that trigger desired responses in political TV ads. By extension, that means it likely could do the same for non-political forms of marketing.
And, to the point above about consumers’ unconscious motivations, for some marketers there is a welcome clarity to being able to see (ostensibly unfiltered) reactions to an ad or a new package. Instead of listening to consumers talk about their feelings, you get to see their feelings - though making sense of those feelings requires the aid of someone who is trained in interpreting these types of feedback.
What are some of the cons of neuromarketing research?
While the purveyors of the technology have no doubt gone to great lengths to make the measurement apparati as unobtrusive as possible, the experience of watching a TV spot wearing a nest of sensors is nothing like plopping on the couch in your den. What effect does that have on viewers’ responses? Are they more self-conscious than they otherwise might be? Does the artificiality of the research setting taint the results?
Further, while the technology can indicate the presence of a reaction - positive or negative - it’s not always easy to more fully characterize the nature of that reaction. And, the connection has yet to be made between the brain’s responses and actual purchasing behavior.
What’s the bottom line?
While there is a lot of buzz around neuromarketing research, and a lot of hype about its capabilities, as with most things of this ilk (or other trends like text analysis, social media or mobile research), rather than a wholesale replacement for all established forms of marketing research, neuromarketing techniques seem to be worthy additions to the researcher’s toolkit.
Marketers and researchers are all after the same elusive types of insights, the ones that indicate a consumer’s true feelings about or response to an ad, a product, an experience. And there are many ways to capture those insights. It depends on the product or service, the audience or market being marketed to, the internal philosophies of the marketer’s organization and, of course, the size of the budget. If emotions do play a strong part in a consumer’s response to your product or service - as they do with political ads, for example - neuromarketing research may be worth investigating.