Neuromarketing is based on the idea that you shouldn’t just ask customers what they think, but find out how they truly feel. But why should you look into subconscious processes?
More information: Mindlab
Neuromarketing is based on the idea that you shouldn’t just ask customers what they think, but find out how they truly feel. But why should you look into subconscious processes? While it feels like you know what you like and want and could probably tell me, there are plenty of factors that have an influence on your everyday decision-making that you don’t even notice. Often, this influence results in something called ‘cognitive biases’, or little things we perceive or do in an illogical way. One of the best examples in the case of marketing is ‘priming’, an effect which means that being exposed to a stimulus (picture, word, sound, etc.) can influence how we perceive another stimulus later on, without us being aware of the influence. But what does this look like in practice?
One of our own studies looked into what effect watching the title sequences for different TV shows has on how people perceive the flavours of different alcoholic drinks. Even though they all drank the same drinks, the flavour ratings varied based on which show they were watching: Downtown Abbey made people rate the drinks as more elegant, refreshing, enjoyable, satisfying, refined and light, while Eastenders only resulted in people thinking their drinks were quite refreshing and light. But priming does not only influence how we perceive flavours, but can have effects on behaviour as well: A study at the University of Nijmegen found that putting participants in a room that smelled of lemon made them faster to respond to cleaning-related words, more likely to say they intended to clean later that day and also made them tidy the desk they were sitting at more (Holland et al., 2005). This shows that even if you’re not aware of them, small details such as scents, colours and words can strongly influence your behaviour. And while it seems obvious that the smell of fresh bread might lead you to buy bread, traditional market research tends to largely ignore these subconscious priming effects.
A large proportion of traditional market research relies on asking people – what they think, how they feel about changes, if new adverts change their perception of the brand of if they’re likely to buy a new product. The problem with this is that people cannot completely truthfully answer most of these questions. Priming demonstrates that while we think we know how we’re being influenced, we are not aware of what truly drives our behaviour. But it doesn’t stop at the priming effect: We also have the tendency to come up with reasons for why we act or feel a certain way, even if these reasons are incorrect (‘confabulation’). We rationalise our decisions after we have made them and come up with potential motivations that had nothing to do with our actions in the first place. This is different from lying, because the aim is not to deceive anyone else, but rather to ‘fill in the gaps’ in our everyday lives. Traditional ‘asking methods’ will trust these rationalisations, even though they aren’t accurate. Neuromarketing methods, on the other hand, do not only take priming into account, but many of them are actually based on the idea of priming.
There is another problem with asking people to explain their decisions: It can sometimes lead them to make completely different choices. Timothy Wilson carried out an experiment with college students in 1991. In this experiment, participants were asked to taste a selection of different jams and rate them based on which ones they liked the most. These ratings were then compared to those of an expert panel. The main aim of the experiment was to looking at the effect of introspection: Half of the participants were asked to give reasons for their choices/ratings, while the others were not asked to justify their decisions. It turns out that the group that were choosing freely without having to state reasons rated the jams very similarly to the expert panel, while the ratings of the ‘introspection group’ varied widely. This shows that asking people to rationalise their decisions does not only give you completely fabricated answers, but that simple questions can actually influence their decisions.
Asking people can be a starting point, and can certainly give you some insight. But it misses out some of the most important factors driving our decisions, and will ignore all the little details that can make all the difference when people decide which product to buy. Good market research understands that people don’t always act rationally, and is able to take subconscious factors into account.
