Neuroscience + Marketing: How human brain sees Marketing

Everyday there is more content on the internet than the day before. According to a recent research from Google, about 50% of ads don’t get any recognition.

All this means you have to work very hard to capture the attention of your target audience. But there’s also a simple hack to this situation.

Ever heard of the term Neuroscience Marketing?

Oh no! It is not another form of marketing strategy.

It is the concept of applying principles of neuroscience in your marketing strategy and analyse how your customers respond to it. As I discussed in my previous article, the role of a creative marketer is to make conversions in less than 2 interactions.

To achieve this feat, a basic knowledge on how the human brain works is very important. This is where neuroscience will be of use.

A lot of marketers these days conduct online surveys and focus groups to predict customer behaviour. But people tend to choose answers which they think is right and hence the conclusion may not be true in many cases especially when the subconscious is at play.

One of the well known concepts of neuroscience is that the human brain has two systems of thinking,

• System 1, which is intuitive, emotional, quick and thus energy efficient.
• System 2, which is logical, rational, slow and hard work for our brains!

The human brain usually prefers System 1 thinking and is antagonistic to System 2.

While all your competitors try to cater to their customer’s System 2 thinking, as a Creative Marketer, you need to tap into the System 1 thinking, which is continually computing information and shaping responses at a subconscious level and think more intuitively about consumer responses.

How you can use Neuroscience to boost your growth

Many large companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon hire neuroscientists, ethnographers to comb through user research. Some companies, however, aren’t that large and probably don’t need a fleet of scientists.

Here are a few simple ways you can leverage the concept of Neuroscience to boost your growth:

1. Clever Pricing Strategy

Rounded pricing

Pricing your product with number ‘9’ in it is an age old tactic and needs some rethinking to be done. Furthermore, according to a recent research, rounded prices were found to bring in new sales as well.

Coz, the system 1 thinking pertains to a user’s emotions. Hence, if a user makes a purchase decision driven by emotions, rounded figures are more attractive to them.

For example let’s take a camera..People looking to buy a camera for a family vacation, make their decisions emotionally. In this case rounded pricing will work. On the other hand, if someone is coming to buy a camera based on its features and specs, it’s a logical decision. In this case non rounded price will work!

You have to figure out whether people approaching are your product emotionally or logically? This can be done only by A/B testing. Once you find intel from this research, use it to drive your future campaigns.

Avoid dollar signs

Recent study by Neuroscientists shows that having a Dollar Sign or Euro Sign in your price shifts attention to loss instead of profit on a subconscious level — Even though you are offering discounts!!

Avoid commas

Use of commas also gives a feeling of being too much expensive — subconsciously!

2. The art of phrasing your pitch

Limited period offers are very effective. People hate missing out on offers. Combining the law of loss of aversion and Theory of Framing is a killer cocktail for creative marketing.

Check out this experiment from Science journal:

People were given $50 dollars. They were also given two options.

CASE 1:

Option 1: Keep $30

Option 2: Gamble with a 50/50 chance of keeping or losing the whole $50

CASE 2:

Option 1: Lose $20

Option 2: Gamble with a 50/50 chance of keeping or losing the whole $50

Only 44% People in the first case chose to gamble. While in the second case 62% chose to gamble!

As you can see, it was just a small change in sentence structuring! They have the same meaning, yet was perceived differently by people!

You need to make your customers feel that — not buying your product will lose them a lot of money. This will come in handy when you are framing CTA’s especially in landing pages!

Humanise your brand

Humanising your brand is a very well known neuroscience hack! It basically helps in building trust and credibility!

Studies suggest that people judge facial expressions in milliseconds and associate the same emotion to your brand. So when you go for stock images, always go for pleasant faces!!

The art of directing attention

A lot of eye tracking technology has proven that viewers tend to look where the person in the image or website is looking.

Have you noticed companies selling baby products? They use adorable babies to market their products. When the baby was facing head on, most people ignored the product and the copy.

Just by making the baby look at the product, the attention to that area increased. Use this hack to increase click through rates of your CTAs!

The art of hacking emotions

People often overlook this factor though it has an immense impact on your marketing campaigns.

Each colour incites a particular emotion. Which emotion do you want to evoke? This hack comes in handy especially when you design your social media images.

Though neuroscience marketing can be a complicated area to touch on when you’re just getting started, it is also a powerful way to improve the success of your marketing campaigns.

What hacks have you used to bring in more conversions for your brand? Share your story in the comments section below!