Business owners from across the globe agree to the fact that knowing your customer is the key to an effective business. Startups on the other hand, make sure they perform thorough business research to get a hang of their marketplace. However, not many businesspersons and researchers have heard of neuromarketing, which is one of the most booming fields of industry analysis. As the name suggests, neuromarketing is a perfect bridge that connects marketing with neuroscience. This is a newly rising branch of marketing, which is helping many companies to understand their clientele in a unique and effective way.
What is Neuromarketing?
Basic understanding of customer psychology is expected from market research agencies that are assigned to study various industries. Attaining deeper knowledge about consumer mindset with additional scientific techniques is the basic motive of neuromarketing. When it comes to defining this technique, it can be said that neuromarketing is the method of studying cognitive, affective and sensorimotor responses of the customer, to various marketing related stimuli. Marketing analysis is all about digging down to the roots of basic human thinking, decision-making and responding abilities, that determines the pathway of their approach towards your products or services.
Why is it Effective?
“Why that is a customer buys a particular thing?” This is a very intriguing question with possible answers about the basic thinking and responding manner of all the customers in your marketplace. According to Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology, more than 90% decisions of customers are made by their subconscious mind, which includes customers from all age, gender and cultural groups. Hence, understanding what your target customer is thinking is extremely important. Various ways, techniques and tests help the cause of neuromarketing research. Most of them are brain-imaging techniques that determine what is exactly going on inside the brain of your choicest buyers.
Neuromarketing Techniques
Various neuropsychological technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography and steady state topography are used to capture common response and sensorimotor activities while coming across various business stimuli. Decision processing is the basic concept of neuromarketing, which is evolved from Plato’s two horses and a chariot theory. Also described as system 1 and system 2, study of both these systems gives information about impulsive, compulsive and emotional buying patterns of customers.
Criticism and Conclusion
Several consumer advocate associations and believers of conventional market research criticize neuromarketing for several reasons. They claim this process to be potentially invasive, a process that collects information, which the customers are not aware of themselves. Some experts have also criticized this technique for being gimmicky and failed attempt in search of innovative and unconventional methods. Overall, one can say that neuromarketing is an evolving process, which may have the potential to determine the future of the existing industry analysis methods. With technological advancements and further inventions can only determine which role this technique could play in qualitative analysis.
