Enhancing our brainpower – Making the most of neuroscience effectively
Today majority of the marketers are facing a dilemma as per recent research. The research revealed that the decisions taken by the consumer are most likely to be influenced by their gut feelings, but the question is that how do the marketers feel something like a gut feeling. Market research mainly uses techniques, including surveys, interviews, and group discussions. But we get some opportunities with neuroscience as it includes some methods, including brain scanning and eye-tracking.
Ideally, less is more:
Many people ask why more is less, and they also argue there are a plethora of choices that are available today, which causes anxiety and also brings in some decision paralysis. Above all, it is daunting to choose from the varieties available.
Clients aren’t good at telling the reasons behind making the purchase:
Ideally, clients aren’t quite aware of the reason why they need to buy some product. Experts see a chart which analyzes the factors which tell why some brand is more famous than others among clients. Besides ease and convenience of hunting, brand users also consider elements including excellent, fun, popular etc. The majority of people say that the cheapest is quite crucial to them, but this factor is also overstated. When asked, the consumers are quite willing to express their views, but they aren’t ready to reveal their opinions in some cases. The reaction is mainly based on cultures.
Neuroscience promises new possibilities:
Market research tends to use a plethora of tried and proven tools, including qualitative and quantitative, like survey-based interviews and group discussions. Thanks to technological advances, they have created some ways to understand why people are doing what they do. Ideally, the term neuroscience is a broad term that encompasses a plethora of techniques, and it can be either indirect or explicit response. The majority of the methods, including brain scanning, are pretty widely used for years now.
Primary considerations including hype, practicality and hype:
The concerns related to ethics are not found as neuroscience methods include measuring, and it doesn’t include brainwashing. The hype is about what neuroscience can deliver as it can count how some parts of the brain tends to respond to the stimuli. The issues include practicability and stability.
The key here is integration:
Firstly, the tests need to answer three questions:
- Do these tools make any sense, or are they even meaningful?
- Do they even deliver incremental insights?
- The cost is justified or not?
The techniques under neuroscience are instrumental in different two types of information, including the information people don’t wish to reveal and the things they don’t know about. Above all, the key is integration featuring conventional techniques. Ideally, it just doesn’t make any sense to use these approaches. You just need to consider some of the objectives and research agendas.
Some of the essential techniques used under Neuroscience techniques:
Neuroscience tends to offer measurements indirectly under marketing and brands. The majority of them have their roots back in medicine and academia. The different methods include brain scanning, brainwave measurement, eye tracking, implicit association measurement, and others.
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging-It tends to measure the blood flow in various parts of the brain during different activities or exposure to stimuli. But there is some large, expensive equipment.
- Electroencephalography- It tends to use the sensors or electrodes on your scalp to determine the brain’s electrical impulses emitted. It is way more straightforward as compared to brain scanning, and it is also excellent at measuring changes over a short time frame.
- Magneto Encephalography- It ideally detects the magnetic field, which is generated by the human brain to analyze the activity of the brain. It also considers using big scanners and is quite expensive and non-scalable, just like the fMRI.
- Facial Coding- It measures some of the micro-expressions, which is most likely correspondent to various emotional states, including happiness, sadness, or surprise. It also captures a plethora of emotions, unlike the EEG or biosensory metrics. You can simply do it by using a simple camera or webcam; at the same time, the manual coding takes a lot of time.
Making the most of Neuroscience:
Some of the best practices of neuroscience:
- You need to be critical and ensure you ask similar neuroscience question methods. Consider asking for proof.
- You can also look for experience as it is a challenging area, and it is essential to understand what is claim as compared to reality.
- Consider integrating as methods don’t promise any accuracy.
Some of the Psychological Principles of Customer Experience Management:
The main problem under marketing is how to drive customers to the company and how to get them to buy the products. This challenge most likely helps in addressing the challenge. These principles tend to create some type of emotional connection.
- Make decisions based on preconceived assumptions and prejudices with regards to an experience- This principle ideally applies to almost all situations as the preconceived notions tend to set the tone of your experience. When you know this principle, you can indeed breach some expectations to create a great marketing space.
- Learn about the moral code- The company tends to mean something when the customers have a relationship with the organization through the brand’s experience. Above all, the customers tend to see the company in what they do. Whenever you buy, don’t forget to donate, or you can say no to plastics. Ideally, these are some examples of the campaign.
- In the moment is mainly affected by the emotional twinges-Some of the products and services are primarily designed to throw an impression of confidence or some other content which will make people feel the difference and also feel pleased to get an experience. The main element here is that the routine experiences are also fun.
What are the business implications?
Businesses need to consider the impacts of both subconsciousness and emotions when it comes to measuring or mapping the journey of the customer. Companies can surely build models that are predictive from the measurements available and gain in sales lastly. The market research most probably depends on the principles to understand the business and map out the client’s experience. Many people ask which is the essential principle of all; then experts say that it all depends on what you want for your firm and where you stand as a company. At a starting point, experts recommend using the experience psychology principle to be aware of the businesses and learn about the customer experience. As a company, you need to be quite aware of how you measure and discover predictively what ideally drives the target audience.
Companies also need to use some practical tools, including the emotional signature, which just goes beyond the common measurements and aligns with the business’s needs. A company must consider all the principles when it comes to evaluating the experience of a person. It is mainly because experience psychology is all about the journey instead of the destination. The resistance is most likely to come from people who don’t like the term emotion.
Some of the spectrums of applications:
- Brands mainly analyze themselves as per the neuromarketing strategy. At a subconscious level, you need to understand what consumers tend to feel about a specific brand as it is a nebulous concept altogether.
- It is pretty challenging to understand what the consumers really wish to get from the products and services. Still, with neuroscientific methods, it can be pretty simple to measure a person’s sensory responses to some product throughout the experience of your consumer.
- Packaging-It is all about how consumers feel about a product, like how it looks on the surface and how it is actually.
Some of the core metrics:
- The attention mainly measures how the sustained forces and shifts the focus over the period over time. It is pretty essential to understand how consumers tend to interact when the stimulus is being studied.
- The memory element considers measuring both formation and strengthening of all the connections as per the long term memory rule. Under the read and write mechanism, the consumer tends to recall memory and also creates a new memory. Mainly all the decisions are driven by emotions.
Written By : Prof. Rachana Chattopadhyay
Designation : Professor – Organizational Behavior and
Human Resource Management
Dean – Academics
Professor Chattopadhyay has received her doctoral degree in Applied Psychology from Calcutta University under the fellowship of Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, in the year 2005. After receiving her Ph.D. degree, she had joined as a Visiting Fellow in the School of Social Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, for post-doctoral research (the year 2005-2006). She is currently Dean (Academics) at IMI Kolkata. Before joining International Management Institute, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor, she was a faculty member in the ICFAI Institute for Management Teachers, Hyderabad as well as ICFAI Business School, Kolkata.
