How Does Your Brain Work? Neuromarketing for Beginners
Do you want to learn how to use neuromarketing to make your marketing more persuasive, create better commercials with less budget, and increase the number of conversions on your website?
The study of neuromarketing has been around for several years, but it’s only recently that the field has become more mainstream. This is because, over the past few decades, there have been great strides in brain research and technology to better understand how our brains work. As a result, companies can now use this information to create ads that target specific emotions and therefore appeal more effectively.
To fully grasp how neuromarketing works, let’s explore some key terms:
Emotions
A feeling that is the counterpart of a specific physiological response helps an organism cope with environmental challenges; emotions are often characterized by increased or decreased arousal on a valence scale.
Arousal
A dynamic component of emotional states that reflects the activity of the ascending reticular activating system and is dependent on inputs from various modalities. It is also defined as a person’s physiological and cognitive activation, indicated by heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate.
Valence
The positive or negative value attached to a particular object, experience, or event. There are 3 categories of valence: pleasantness (engagement), arousal (activation), and dominance. Valence ultimately means the amount of positivity vs. negativity a feeling has in it. It is said that valence drives attentional processes.
Cognitive Neuroscience
The study of the neural basis of cognition, with an emphasis on computational modeling. It examines internal mental states (such as mental imagery and perception) using techniques from neuropsychology, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, cognitive psychology, and computational neuroscience.
Attentional focus
A cognitive mechanism for concentrating on some features of the environment while ignoring others.
Top-Down processing
Influences on sensation and perception originate in higher brain regions, especially those involved in memory and meaning. Top-down processing is a perception method involving high-level cognitive processes (such as context or anticipation) that interact with lower-level processes (e.g., sensory data or early vision). This type of processing contrasts with bottom-up processing (such as feature detection), where the perception is built from essential elements.
Uncertainty reduction theory
The theory is that people engage in a systematic, lifelong search for information about which they could be uncertain and actively reduce those uncertainties whenever possible. Uncertainty reduction theory can explain some otherwise puzzling social behaviors, such as asking personal questions early in an initial encounter.
Familiarity principle
People prefer stimuli they have previously seen. The familiarity principle states that it is more comfortable to receive information you are already familiar with or have expected.
Emotional Contagion
The tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocal tones, postures, and mannerisms with others’ emotional states. This creates empathy between people or increases the likelihood that one will express an emotion that is consistent with those present in the stimulus.
Neuromarketing
The use of neuroscience and biometric methods to study consumers and markets. Neuromarketing research can be utilized to test anything from advertisements, packaging, product design to store layouts, the effectiveness of salespeople, or even political messages. The ultimate goal of neuromarketing is to improve communications between companies and consumers.
Tl;dr — Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to marketing. It’s based on understanding how your customer’s brain works at different stages in the purchasing process or lead funnel, which can help you drive more sales with less effort.
I’m going to dive deeper into each section over the coming weeks so stay tuned and sign up for my newsletter if you want more.
