Aoife McGuinness, Neuroscience Consultant at HeyHuman believes that, while we’ve still not seen the full potential for neuromarketing, especially in advertising, there is a renewed confidence in its potential.
The Pepsi Challenge was a blind taste test first employed by PepsiCo in 1975 where people had to taste both Pepsi and Coca-Cola from a white cup and then choose which cola they preferred. Thirty years later researchers at Emory University repeated the experiment but this time they scanned people’s brains.
When the drink wasn’t revealed, the results showed consistent neural activity between both colas. However, when the subjects could see the brand, the limbic parts of the brain, associated with emotion and memories, showed increased activity for Coca-Cola. This suggested that the framing of the brand altered how the brain perceived the drink, and that this sensitivity could be measured with brain monitoring techniques. This was the seminal neuroscience study that launched neuromarketing.
Neuromarketing refers to the measurement of physiological and neural activity to gain insight into people’s motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development and other marketing areas. The most common neuromarketing techniques are EEG or electroencephalography which correlates brain activity to different states of arousal and cognition and eye-tracking, which measures visual attention.
Since then neuromarketing has experienced a tumultuous ride through periods of optimism, excitement, scepticism, rejection and acceptance. The period of cynicism was mostly due to early vendors over-claiming the ability of the technology, leading to disillusioned marketers.
In 2013, Steve Genco published Neuromarketing for Dummies and in it outlined what practitioners of neuromarketing techniques were lacking:
Since then advances are well underway as academics and research vendors tackle these issues. Specifically, a range of academic studies have demonstrated that neuroscience data can predict market results more accurately than traditional market research tools such as surveys and focus groups; a term dubbed as ‘neuroforecasting’ by Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson. For example, researchers at Emory University found that while listening to music, brain activation significantly correlated with sales data three years later, whilst participants’ stated responses did not.
Another study led by Northwestern university predicted the box office success of movies with more than 20% greater accuracy than traditional methods by recording the brain activity of participants as they watched movie trailers.
More recently, a study led by Thomas Ramsoy into conscious and subconscious destination preference found cognitive responses to travel destinations could predict subsequent stated responses.
The true value of applied neuroscience research to advertising is in using it as early on in the creative process as possible.
Aoife McGuinness
Studies like these demonstrate a maturation of the industry, resulting in a renewed confidence in neuromarketing and excitement towards its future potential.
That said, we’ve still not seen the full potential for neuromarketing, especially in advertising. Most neuromarketing research in advertising is currently done for TV ads after the ad is created. Whilst improvements can be made in terms of optimisation e.g. editing certain scenes that didn’t connect emotionally, it’s like polishing a broken vase.
The true value of applied neuroscience research to advertising is in using it as early on in the creative process as possible, to test different creative territories and concepts before any further development work takes place. Not only is it a more efficient way to do research, it results in better creative outputs too. However, this is difficult for agencies to implement, as contracting external research providers can be a long and tedious process and often difficult to fit into already squeezed creative deadlines.
That is why HeyHuman has developed its neuromarketing research arm within the agency, HeyLab. It allows us to do neuroscience testing at each stage of the creative process, not just at the end as a vanity project. One client we have done this for is Natures Menu. Not only did we use neuromarketing research techniques throughout their entire rebrand, testing different packaging and logo redesigns, we also used it at every stage of the freeze-dried launch in the UK.
From uncovering subconscious attitudes towards the freeze-dried category and determining what framing can lead to positive purchase motivation, right through to discovering which creative territories motivate people most, we used neuroscience throughout the entire process.
Aoife completed a Masters degree in Neuroscience at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and has been working as a neuroscience marketing consultant for HeyHuman. Interested in the intersection of art and science, she analyses how the brain processes communications at HeyHuman and creates multi-sensory experiences with electronic music collective, Universe of Tang. Aoife has presented neuroscience research at global conferences such as SXSW and Social Media Week.
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