Brain sells
As companies come under increasing pressure to design and develop products that are guaranteed to succeed in the marketplace, manufacturers are turning to neuromarketing to gain greater insight into what motivates consumers to buy their products and services
By Gemma Calvert FRSA
The massive global increase in new products and services has meant that consumers are now faced with multiple choices at every point of the buying process. From the supermarket to the car showroom, manufacturers have to work even harder to design products that will grab more attention and deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction than those of their competitors. Traditional approaches to understanding consumer wants and needs have typically relied on measuring people’s explicit responses via questionnaires, surveys or focus groups. But with new products continuing to fail at an estimated rate of 80% within the first year, costing the global manufacturing industry billions of pounds in lost revenue, companies are looking for ways to figure out what consumers really want.
Asking consumers what they want or whether they are likely to buy a new product seldom accurately predicts their subsequent purchasing behaviour. As the late David Ogilvy said, “consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say”. We now know from neuroscientific research that a vast amount of our complex decision making occurs as a result of brain processes that operate below the level of our conscious awareness. Furthermore, many of these decisions are heavily influenced by our emotional brain: by how we implicitly feel, rather than how we think. Coupled with the uniquely human tendency to post-rationalise our choices, is it any wonder that manufacturers that rely on explicit consumer responses are often left second-guessing what we really want?
The emerging science of neuromarketing – the application of neuroscience (the study of the brain) to understand consumer behaviour – offers manufacturers a way of measuring these unconscious emotional responses to a vast range of new products. This, in turn, helps them understand how to communicate the products’ emotional benefits most effectively to consumers.
Neuromarketers’ goal is to use this information to design better products that meet consumers’ underlying needs. For example, we do not buy a new brand of toothpaste because it provides 30% more whitening (its functional benefit), we buy it because of its associated, but often implicit, emotional benefit: that having whiter teeth will make us feel better and more confident about ourselves. Neuromarketing companies are working with manufacturers to uncover and quantify the precise nature of the unconscious emotional responses that a potential new product evokes in order to optimise the end product for the consumer.
This fast-growing neuromarketing industry has far-reaching potential. In the past 10 years, extensive worldwide research has found that implicit responses are often better at predicting our subsequent behaviour than explicit attitudes. Today, marketers can use tools that tap into our unconscious desires at every stage of the brand journey. This includes understanding our basic needs and wants within the context of our cultural surroundings, working out how the different sensory properties of a product affect our reward system, assessing how our perception of a product is influenced by the packaging and subsequent advertising campaign, and even considering what makes us feel most confident and happy when we walk into a store.
Using MRI scanners that can see inside the brain of an individual while they are exposed to marketing messages, campaigns and prototype products, manufacturers can measure a large number of brain processes that are the prerequisites to purchasing. For example, they can find out the extent to which marketing messages or campaigns are encoded into long-term memory, whether key frames within a television commercial have been absorbed and whether changing certain parameters of a new product alters the extent to which it stimulates the brain’s reward areas. The range of human emotions that manufacturers can measure is considerable: trust, anticipation of price, brand loyalty and empathy are just a few. It is also possible to capture our immediate, instinctive reactions to images of brands, websites and commercials online. This involves measuring respondents’ reaction times long before the conscious, rationalising brain has had a chance to step in and alter the response.
So how are these neuromarketing techniques benefiting new product design in the context of manufacturing? In the increasingly competitive automotive industry, designing a product that has unique consumer appeal is key to gaining the edge over competitors. Working with researchers at the University of Warwick, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has been applying the psychology of sound perception to create cars that not only look good, but also sound appealing to customers. Automotive engineers have spent decades working out how to remove interior car noise, resulting in increasingly quiet vehicles. Yet implicit psychological research has found that when consumers accelerate, they do not want a silent response. They want to hear sounds that are associated with power and sportiness, or luxury and refinement. This insight into consumers’ implicit desires is helping JLR sell cars that enhance the driving experience.
Unilever Research has used implicit research methods to develop a lip balm that promises two benefits: first, to make lips feel softer by doubling their sensitivity to external touch, and second, to improve consumers’ overall emotional state. The Unilever touch lexicon measured 26 sensory and 14 emotional attributes. From a sensory perspective, there was an expected improvement in smoothness and softness, and a corresponding decrease in roughness and dryness. More intriguingly, these sensory (explicit) factors were accompanied by a significant increase in emotional (implicit) attributes, ranging from ‘soothing’ to ‘sexy’.
Our own research for a global packaged goods company has shown that, by measuring the implicit interaction of our multiple senses, it is possible to develop products that fulfil consumers’ sensory desires. Neuroscience has shown that, although we are not consciously aware of it, our experience of tasting, smelling and touching a product partly depends on what we see as we experience these sensory inputs. This knowledge can help manufacturers solve certain dilemmas, such as how to strike the right balance between comfort and practicality. Towel manufacturers, for example, have to choose between making
a product softer and making it more absorbent. One solution is to alter the visual appearance of materials such that our brains perceive the towelling as softer, while it retains its ability
to absorb damp.
Beauty and healthcare companies are not alone in using this growing understanding of implicit emotional benefits to drive product innovation. Food and drinks manufacturers, restaurants, technology companies and many other businesses are turning to neuromarketing to gain greater insight into consumers’ innermost desires.
Neither is neuromarketing solely being used in the context of big business. In a study of the efficacy of cigarette health warnings funded by a syndicate of anti-smoking organisations, Neurosense used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain response of smokers to images of cigarette packs with and without government health warnings. The results, which were published in a report commissioned by the French government, found that packs with printed warnings such as ‘smoking kills’ were no more successful at reducing the brain’s nicotine craving response than packs without warnings. In fact, among those smokers who admitted that they felt guilty when confronted by these warnings, activation in their nicotine-craving regions increased. Neurosense is now acting as an adviser to the EU Commission on the use of implicit test methods to predict the likely efficacy of the next set of EU-wide cigarette warnings.
Uses and abuses
For many years, manufacturers have sought a closer alliance with their customers, recognising that including them in the design and manufacturing process not only delivers superior products but also enhances the customer experience and builds loyalty to the brand. And while not a panacea – the human brain is an extraordinarily complicated organ and neuroscientists have some way to go before they understand it completely – there is little doubt that neuromarketing offers manufacturers a more objective and scientific framework for the study of consumer behaviour. But should consumers be concerned that the ability to see inside our heads and capture our subconscious responses will allow marketers to manipulate us into making purchasing decisions that we otherwise would not?
Admittedly, as with any new technology, there is always the possibility that practices and processes may be open to abuse. Having recognised this concern, the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research is drawing up a code of conduct with the industry to protect consumers from malpractice in this area. In practice, however, manipulating consumers into making choices that have no benefit to them is difficult. Our brains may absorb information without conscious awareness and influence our behaviour at a subconscious level, but that does not mean they omit to calculate the cost-benefit level of a decision, nor that they fail to evaluate the value of an outcome. If we make a choice based on information that is inconsistent with the experience, or have a negative experience despite expectations of a reward, we are unlikely to repeat this behaviour.
Other research has shown that by making individuals overtly aware of the processes that the brain goes through during decision making, and the influence of both external and internal factors, we can empower consumers to make better and healthier decisions. For example, if we know how long it takes for satiety signals from the gut to reach the brain, we can learn to eat more slowly. This helps us to feel satiated and therefore makes us more likely to eat only the amount the body needs. Marketers may be clever, but consumers’ brains are vastly superior. In this respect, we have an inbuilt mechanism that protects us from attempts at malevolent manipulation.
The good news is that most neuromarketing firms embrace the opportunity to interact with public research ethics committees (indeed, this is compulsory in the case of most functional brain-scanning experiments where MRI machines are tied to hospitals or university departments). Furthermore, neuromarketing research takes place among consenting groups whose identity remains anonymous throughout the process, and only the aggregated data is available for analysis.
Businesses are more likely to be successful if they understand what their customers want and deliver it time and time again. The failure of so many new products and brand extensions shows that traditional consumer research methods are simply not accurate enough. As a result, throughout the world, raw materials, labour, revenue and time are wasted in manufacturing products that are later rejected by the very people who said they would buy them. Any technique, such as neuromarketing, that can make the process more efficient has to be in the best interests of all stakeholders in the manufacturing and purchasing cycle, including, above all, the consumer.
Gemma Calvert FRSA is the managing director of Neurosense and a former professor of applied neuroscience at the University of Warwick. Illustration: Prince Hat
By Gemma Calvert FRSA
The massive global increase in new products and services has meant that consumers are now faced with multiple choices at every point of the buying process. From the supermarket to the car showroom, manufacturers have to work even harder to design products that will grab more attention and deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction than those of their competitors. Traditional approaches to understanding consumer wants and needs have typically relied on measuring people’s explicit responses via questionnaires, surveys or focus groups. But with new products continuing to fail at an estimated rate of 80% within the first year, costing the global manufacturing industry billions of pounds in lost revenue, companies are looking for ways to figure out what consumers really want.
Asking consumers what they want or whether they are likely to buy a new product seldom accurately predicts their subsequent purchasing behaviour. As the late David Ogilvy said, “consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say”. We now know from neuroscientific research that a vast amount of our complex decision making occurs as a result of brain processes that operate below the level of our conscious awareness. Furthermore, many of these decisions are heavily influenced by our emotional brain: by how we implicitly feel, rather than how we think. Coupled with the uniquely human tendency to post-rationalise our choices, is it any wonder that manufacturers that rely on explicit consumer responses are often left second-guessing what we really want?
The emerging science of neuromarketing – the application of neuroscience (the study of the brain) to understand consumer behaviour – offers manufacturers a way of measuring these unconscious emotional responses to a vast range of new products. This, in turn, helps them understand how to communicate the products’ emotional benefits most effectively to consumers.
Neuromarketers’ goal is to use this information to design better products that meet consumers’ underlying needs. For example, we do not buy a new brand of toothpaste because it provides 30% more whitening (its functional benefit), we buy it because of its associated, but often implicit, emotional benefit: that having whiter teeth will make us feel better and more confident about ourselves. Neuromarketing companies are working with manufacturers to uncover and quantify the precise nature of the unconscious emotional responses that a potential new product evokes in order to optimise the end product for the consumer.
This fast-growing neuromarketing industry has far-reaching potential. In the past 10 years, extensive worldwide research has found that implicit responses are often better at predicting our subsequent behaviour than explicit attitudes. Today, marketers can use tools that tap into our unconscious desires at every stage of the brand journey. This includes understanding our basic needs and wants within the context of our cultural surroundings, working out how the different sensory properties of a product affect our reward system, assessing how our perception of a product is influenced by the packaging and subsequent advertising campaign, and even considering what makes us feel most confident and happy when we walk into a store.
Using MRI scanners that can see inside the brain of an individual while they are exposed to marketing messages, campaigns and prototype products, manufacturers can measure a large number of brain processes that are the prerequisites to purchasing. For example, they can find out the extent to which marketing messages or campaigns are encoded into long-term memory, whether key frames within a television commercial have been absorbed and whether changing certain parameters of a new product alters the extent to which it stimulates the brain’s reward areas. The range of human emotions that manufacturers can measure is considerable: trust, anticipation of price, brand loyalty and empathy are just a few. It is also possible to capture our immediate, instinctive reactions to images of brands, websites and commercials online. This involves measuring respondents’ reaction times long before the conscious, rationalising brain has had a chance to step in and alter the response.
So how are these neuromarketing techniques benefiting new product design in the context of manufacturing? In the increasingly competitive automotive industry, designing a product that has unique consumer appeal is key to gaining the edge over competitors. Working with researchers at the University of Warwick, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has been applying the psychology of sound perception to create cars that not only look good, but also sound appealing to customers. Automotive engineers have spent decades working out how to remove interior car noise, resulting in increasingly quiet vehicles. Yet implicit psychological research has found that when consumers accelerate, they do not want a silent response. They want to hear sounds that are associated with power and sportiness, or luxury and refinement. This insight into consumers’ implicit desires is helping JLR sell cars that enhance the driving experience.
Unilever Research has used implicit research methods to develop a lip balm that promises two benefits: first, to make lips feel softer by doubling their sensitivity to external touch, and second, to improve consumers’ overall emotional state. The Unilever touch lexicon measured 26 sensory and 14 emotional attributes. From a sensory perspective, there was an expected improvement in smoothness and softness, and a corresponding decrease in roughness and dryness. More intriguingly, these sensory (explicit) factors were accompanied by a significant increase in emotional (implicit) attributes, ranging from ‘soothing’ to ‘sexy’.
Our own research for a global packaged goods company has shown that, by measuring the implicit interaction of our multiple senses, it is possible to develop products that fulfil consumers’ sensory desires. Neuroscience has shown that, although we are not consciously aware of it, our experience of tasting, smelling and touching a product partly depends on what we see as we experience these sensory inputs. This knowledge can help manufacturers solve certain dilemmas, such as how to strike the right balance between comfort and practicality. Towel manufacturers, for example, have to choose between making
a product softer and making it more absorbent. One solution is to alter the visual appearance of materials such that our brains perceive the towelling as softer, while it retains its ability
to absorb damp.
Beauty and healthcare companies are not alone in using this growing understanding of implicit emotional benefits to drive product innovation. Food and drinks manufacturers, restaurants, technology companies and many other businesses are turning to neuromarketing to gain greater insight into consumers’ innermost desires.
Neither is neuromarketing solely being used in the context of big business. In a study of the efficacy of cigarette health warnings funded by a syndicate of anti-smoking organisations, Neurosense used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain response of smokers to images of cigarette packs with and without government health warnings. The results, which were published in a report commissioned by the French government, found that packs with printed warnings such as ‘smoking kills’ were no more successful at reducing the brain’s nicotine craving response than packs without warnings. In fact, among those smokers who admitted that they felt guilty when confronted by these warnings, activation in their nicotine-craving regions increased. Neurosense is now acting as an adviser to the EU Commission on the use of implicit test methods to predict the likely efficacy of the next set of EU-wide cigarette warnings.
Uses and abuses
For many years, manufacturers have sought a closer alliance with their customers, recognising that including them in the design and manufacturing process not only delivers superior products but also enhances the customer experience and builds loyalty to the brand. And while not a panacea – the human brain is an extraordinarily complicated organ and neuroscientists have some way to go before they understand it completely – there is little doubt that neuromarketing offers manufacturers a more objective and scientific framework for the study of consumer behaviour. But should consumers be concerned that the ability to see inside our heads and capture our subconscious responses will allow marketers to manipulate us into making purchasing decisions that we otherwise would not?
Admittedly, as with any new technology, there is always the possibility that practices and processes may be open to abuse. Having recognised this concern, the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research is drawing up a code of conduct with the industry to protect consumers from malpractice in this area. In practice, however, manipulating consumers into making choices that have no benefit to them is difficult. Our brains may absorb information without conscious awareness and influence our behaviour at a subconscious level, but that does not mean they omit to calculate the cost-benefit level of a decision, nor that they fail to evaluate the value of an outcome. If we make a choice based on information that is inconsistent with the experience, or have a negative experience despite expectations of a reward, we are unlikely to repeat this behaviour.
Other research has shown that by making individuals overtly aware of the processes that the brain goes through during decision making, and the influence of both external and internal factors, we can empower consumers to make better and healthier decisions. For example, if we know how long it takes for satiety signals from the gut to reach the brain, we can learn to eat more slowly. This helps us to feel satiated and therefore makes us more likely to eat only the amount the body needs. Marketers may be clever, but consumers’ brains are vastly superior. In this respect, we have an inbuilt mechanism that protects us from attempts at malevolent manipulation.
The good news is that most neuromarketing firms embrace the opportunity to interact with public research ethics committees (indeed, this is compulsory in the case of most functional brain-scanning experiments where MRI machines are tied to hospitals or university departments). Furthermore, neuromarketing research takes place among consenting groups whose identity remains anonymous throughout the process, and only the aggregated data is available for analysis.
Businesses are more likely to be successful if they understand what their customers want and deliver it time and time again. The failure of so many new products and brand extensions shows that traditional consumer research methods are simply not accurate enough. As a result, throughout the world, raw materials, labour, revenue and time are wasted in manufacturing products that are later rejected by the very people who said they would buy them. Any technique, such as neuromarketing, that can make the process more efficient has to be in the best interests of all stakeholders in the manufacturing and purchasing cycle, including, above all, the consumer.
Gemma Calvert FRSA is the managing director of Neurosense and a former professor of applied neuroscience at the University of Warwick. Illustration: Prince Hat
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